kimchi – AI‑powered coding assistant for the terminal

What it is

kimchi is a command‑line tool that lets you talk to an AI coding agent directly from your terminal. It connects to the kimchi LLM service (via the pi‑mono coding‑agent SDK) and can perform tasks such as planning, writing, reviewing, exploring, and researching code. The assistant runs in two modes – a single‑model mode where one model does all work, or a multi‑model mode where different roles (builder, reviewer, explorer, …) are delegated to the most appropriate model.

Key features

Feature	What it does
Interactive CLI	Launch with kimchi; use /model, /tags, /ferment, etc. to control the session.
Model orchestration	Built‑in support for multiple LLM providers (kimchi‑dev, Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.). Roles can be assigned single models or pools; the orchestrator picks the lightest‑tier model that fits the task.
Ferment project mode	Persistent, multi‑session project management. Define a goal, break it into phases/steps, and the agent continues across restarts.
Ferment V2 (experimental)	Objective‑driven controller with token‑budget limits and automatic evaluation of completion.
Tagging & analytics	Every request is automatically tagged with model:{id} and phase:{name}; users can add up to 10 custom key:value tags for cost attribution.
LSP integration	Auto‑detects TypeScript/JavaScript (typescript-language-server) and Go (gopls) servers to give the agent type‑aware diagnostics, hover, definition, rename, etc.
Remote sessions	/teleport can hand off a running session to a cloud sandbox, letting you resume on another machine.
Cross‑platform install	Homebrew, one‑line install script, or PowerShell installer for Windows.

How to get started

# macOS / Linux (Homebrew)
brew install getkimchi/tap/kimchi
# or one‑liner installer
curl -fsSL https://github.com/getkimchi/kimchi/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash
# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://github.com/getkimchi/kimchi/releases/latest/download/install.ps1 | iex

kimchi setup   # interactive API‑key configuration
kimchi          # start the coding assistant

Use kimchi --help for the full list of sub‑commands.

Who might find it useful?

• Developers who want an AI pair‑programmer without leaving the terminal.
• Teams that need reproducible, tag‑based cost tracking for LLM usage.
• Projects that benefit from persistent, multi‑session planning (Ferment).
• Anyone comfortable with a CLI and looking for LLM‑driven code assistance, especially when they already use the kimchi LLM service.

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All details above are taken directly from the repository’s README.