Annie CLI - Starter Kit

2 min read Original article ↗

Annie CLI is a terminal-native AI assistant for infrastructure observability. Ask natural language questions, pipe in kubectl output or logs, and get markdown-rendered answers, all from your terminal.

Get Started

Core Usage

Interactive Chat

Launch annie with no arguments to enter the full-screen TUI: active project in the banner, animated thinking spinner, scrollable viewport, and markdown-rendered responses. Context is maintained across the session for natural follow-ups. Slash commands autocomplete: start with / and press TAB.

One-Shot Queries

For scripting or quick questions, use annie ask:

# Ask a question directly
annie ask "why is checkout slow?"

# Add context
annie ask "what changed?" --context env=prod --context team=payments

# JSON output for scripting
annie ask "list services" --output json | jq '.answer'

Pipe Anything

Annie reads piped stdin automatically. Feed it logs, events, or any text for instant analysis:

kubectl get events -A | annie ask "anything unusual?"
kubectl logs -n prod -l app=backend --tail=200 | annie
cat error.log | annie ask "what's the root cause?"

When both stdin and stdout are pipes, Annie falls back to one-shot mode for scripting.

Root Cause Analyses

Annie runs a multi-step investigation when you ask for an RCA: hypotheses are generated, refined, and ranked by confidence. Use this when the question is “why is X failing” rather than “what is X”.

annie ask --rca "why are our database connection pools getting exhausted?"

Or in the TUI: /rca why are our database connection pools getting exhausted? Each RCA answer ends with hypotheses labeled [H1], [H2], [H3] and a confidence score for each.

Use from AI Coding Agents

Annie works as a bridge between AI coding agents and your infrastructure. For example, from inside Claude Code:

> Use the annie cli to determine how many ec2 instances are in <Anyshift Project Name>

Claude Code runs annie ask on your behalf, interprets the response, and incorporates the infrastructure context into your workflow.

Reference

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