🦇 Aela - Your Terminal AI Sidekick

An agentic, terminal-based AI assistant powered by OpenRouter.

Aela is a lightweight but powerful agentic CLI tool. It brings autonomous AI capabilities directly into your terminal, allowing you to converse with LLMs that can read your local files, write code, and execute bash commands on your behalf.

Whether you need to analyze a Git repository, refactor an entire directory, or scaffold a new project, Aela acts as your personal terminal sidekick.

✨ Features

• Agentic Capabilities: Aela doesn't just chat. He has direct access to read/write files, execute bash commands, fetch full webpages, search the web (via Tavily), and even pause to ask you for clarification mid-task.
• Interactive REPL Mode: Drop into a continuous, multi-turn chat session with persistent memory (aela repl).
• Beautiful Theming: A polished, color-coded terminal UX built with picocolors.
• Model Agnostic: Powered by OpenRouter, you can instantly switch between the best models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3) directly from the CLI.
• Zero-Friction Setup: Automatically prompts and securely stores your API keys locally (~/.aela/config.json) on first run. No messy environment variables required.
• Lightweight & Fast: Built entirely in TypeScript with a minimal footprint.

🚀 Installation

Install Aela globally using npm:

npm install -g aela-ai

Or run directly without installing:

npx aela-ai <your prompt>

💻 Usage

Simply type aela followed by your prompt for one-shot execution, or type aela repl to drop into a continuous chat session with persistent memory. No flags necessary.

# One-shot command
aela your prompt here

# Start an interactive REPL session
aela repl

# Read files and summarize
aela read package.json and summarize what this project does

# Search and analyze codebase
aela find all TODO comments in my codebase

# Write code and scaffold
aela create a new python script that scrapes a website

# Search the Web
aela Search the web for the latest news about OpenAI

# Fetch and Read Webpages
aela Go to https://news.ycombinator.com and list the top 3 stories right now

To see the interactive welcome screen and all available commands, simply run:

aela help

⚙️ Configuration

Aela allows you to easily configure your preferences on the fly.

• Select Model: Fetch and choose from a dynamic list of available OpenRouter models:

  aela config model

• Set API Key (OpenRouter):

  aela config apiKey <your-key>

• Set Web Search API Key (Tavily):

  aela config tavilyApiKey <your-key>

• Set Max Tokens: (Useful to prevent OpenRouter 402 Credit limit errors)

  aela config maxTokens 4000

🛠️ Built With

• TypeScript
• Node.js
• OpenAI Node SDK (configured for OpenRouter)

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Built as a lightweight alternative to full-scale agentic terminal environments.