Your starting point for working with AI coding CLIs — and the cost-aware control plane for a fleet of them. Type
clikaeand land on everything you were just doing — your recent sessions across every account and every engine (Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity), each with a one-line recap of where you left off. Pick one and pick up where you were. When a tank runs dry mid-task, carry the same session onward — or fan a headless job out across accounts and engines, each burning its own subscription, none eating your main budget."Kirikae" (切り替え, ki-ri-ka-e) is Japanese for "switching".
⚠️ Unofficial.clikaeis a community tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of the CLI vendors it integrates with. "Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC; other CLI names are trademarks of their respective owners.
You're juggling AI coding sessions across more than one account — two Claude subscriptions because one Max plan ran dry, a Codex login, maybe Antigravity too — in different terminals, on different projects, half of them unfinished. Which one was that in? Which account? What was I even doing? So you /clear, reopen, and re-explain the project to a fresh session.
clikae is the on-ramp that fixes it. The home board lists those sessions newest first, each with its one-line recap read free from Claude's own session summary; pick one, hit Enter, and you're back — right account, right session. (It also cleanly switches any env-var CLI — gh, gcloud, kubectl, aws… — but AI coding CLIs are where it shines.)
clikae is a small, pure-bash tool. The name is 切り替え — switching — so
clikae is the verb: clikae <engine> <tank> points an engine (a CLI like
claude, codex, gh) at one of your tanks (an account/config) and runs it. No verb
to memorise; the program name is the verb.
It:
- Creates isolated tank directories for each engine (one folder per engine + tank).
- Generates shell aliases (
claude-work,gh-personal, …) you can use in a new terminal. - On macOS, generates double-clickable
.applaunchers that open a Terminal window with the right env vars set and a custom window title so you can tell them apart. - Carries a live session to another tank when one runs dry —
clikae to <tank>keeps the same conversation going on the other account's quota (andclikae to <other-engine>hands a written brief across vendors, summarized on-device by a local model when you have one —apfel,ollama, orllm— so your session never leaves your machine, costs nothing, and works offline). - Runs headless tasks across tanks —
clikae burn <engine> <tank> --artifact <path> -- <cmd>runs a task on a tank, verifies it by the artifact it produces (never the exit code —codex execexits 0 even when it hit its limit), and re-fires it on the next tank if one runs dry. The headless sibling ofclikae to. - Cleans up after itself when you're done with a tank.
It works for any CLI that selects its config via an environment variable (or a flag), ships with built-in adapters for Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub CLI, gcloud, Docker, Helm, kubectl, AWS, Azure CLI, npm, Terraform, Pulumi, and Vercel (plus real per-account multi-tank for Antigravity / agy — each tank carries its own Google login via the macOS Keychain), and adding a new one is ~10 lines of bash. No daemons, no global state, and exactly one opt-out network call (a throttled update check — CLIKAE_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 silences it) — every line is auditable.
Once you have more than one account on more than one engine, the home board
stops being a switcher and starts being a control plane: one person directing
a fleet of AI coding CLIs, each burning its own subscription quota, none of
them quietly eating the budget you're using for your main session. clikae knows
where each engine keeps its config and transcripts, how each one signals a usage
limit, and which tank still has fuel — so the arbitrage is two commands, not a
bag of --resume flags and environment-variable juggling:
-
Hit a wall, keep going —
clikae to. When the tank you're on runs dry, carry the same live conversation onto another tank's quota (a real--resume), or hand it across vendors as a written brief — Claude → Codex → Antigravity. The cross-vendor brief is summarized on-device by a local model when you have one (apfel,ollama, orllm), so the session never leaves your machine, costs nothing, and works offline. -
Fan the grunt work out —
clikae burn. Run a long, headless task on a tank and verify it by the artifact it produces — never the exit code (codex execexits0even when it hit its limit). When that tank runs dry, clikae re-fires the same task on your next reserve tank automatically, skipping any account that shares a dried login and never reaching for the tank your interactive session is live on. The expensive supervisor stays asleep; the cheap workers burn whichever account still has gas. -
Spot a wall before it's a wall —
clikae watch. Tail a running engine, notice when it's about to go dry, and offer (or auto-carry) the session onward to the next tank in your burn order.
Both to and burn follow one rule — aggregate, never mutate the source. A
session or a memory slice is carried as a copy; the tank you came from is
left exactly as it was. No proxy, no daemon, no traffic interception — clikae
reshapes where your state lives, it never sits in the middle of your requests.
Driving this headless — or letting an LLM agent drive it (fanning a job across
accounts, best-of-N across vendors)? The orchestration playbook
is the field guide: when to use burn vs conduct, the rules that keep it honest
(judge by the artifact, never the exit code), the misconfigured-burn anti-pattern,
and how to see your fleet from inside a Claude Code session.
Homebrew (macOS / Linux):
brew install CVERInc/clikae/clikaeThe CVERInc/clikae/ prefix is the tap — clikae ships from its own tap repo,
not (yet) in homebrew-core, so the prefix is expected and normal (a fully
supported install, not a sign it's "unpublished").
Or curl | bash (no Homebrew needed — installs to ~/.local):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CVERInc/clikae/main/install.sh | bashIt's pure bash, so read it first if you'd rather not pipe to a shell — every line
is auditable. From-source and custom-PREFIX options:
docs/installation.md.
Platform. clikae is a macOS / Linux tool — it's bash, and that's the point. A PowerShell module lives in
powershell/but is community-contributed and unsupported: it isn't part of the maintained grammar and its CI is informational only. Windows users very welcome to drive it — PRs appreciated.
clikae init claude work --alias # create a tank (+ a `claude-work` alias)
clikae claude work # switch to it and run — the bare verbHit a usage limit mid-task? Carry the same conversation to your other tank and keep going on its quota:
clikae to personal # carry the live session to tank `personal`
clikae to codex # or across engines (a written brief)Type clikae any time to land on your home board: your recent sessions
across every account and engine (newest first, each with a one-line recap), above
your tanks in a single burn order you can rearrange with [ / ]. Every tank
wears a traffic-light fuel dot — 🟢 ready · 🔴 dry (with the vendor's reset
time) · ○ no reading — so one glance tells you which account still has gas in it:
clikae # your home board (run `clikae doctor` for a health check)- Installation — Homebrew, from source,
curl | bash, PATH setup. - Usage — full command reference, the
migratecommand, how it works, supported CLIs. - Grammar — the language clikae speaks: why it's a verb, engine/tank/fuel,
clikae to, agy. - Troubleshooting — aliases not loading, Gatekeeper on
.app, AWS profiles, undoing rc edits. - Orchestration — driving clikae headless (or letting an agent drive it):
burnvsconduct, the honesty rules, anti-patterns, seeing your fleet. - Expectations — "is this a bug?" — behaviours that look surprising but are deliberate (the fuel dot, codex resume/time, agy's global switch, …).
- Claude on macOS — why migrating asks you to log in again (Keychain), and why the startup screen can look different (it's not clikae).
- Adding an adapter — teach clikae a new CLI.
- v0.5 — the fuel-tank grammar. clikae became the verb (
clikae <engine> <tank>),clikae tocarries a session onward (same engine resumes; another engine gets a written brief), and the engine/tank/fuel vocabulary landed throughout. See docs/grammar.md. - v0.5.4 — the fuel gauge. The board's dot stopped meaning "you are here": 🟢 ready · 🔴 dry (the vendor's verbatim reset time) · ○ no reading — never a guessed green. See docs/DESIGN-board-fuel-dots.md.
- v0.5.5 — real multi-account agy, and
burn. Each Antigravity tank carries its own Google login via the macOS Keychain;clikae burnruns headless tasks across tanks, verified by the artifact they produce, never the exit code. - v0.5.12 — the quality punch-list hit empty. State schema versioning landed; since then it's been polish. The full story, version by version: CHANGELOG.md.
- v1.0 — someday. A macOS menu bar app (
gui/ClikaeMenuBar) exists as a build-verified skeleton; it ships when it earns it.
Pure bash, no runtime dependencies, held to a deliberate bar:
bats-coresuite (300+ tests), run in CI on macOS and Ubuntu on every push/PR.shellcheckclean (zero warnings) acrossbin/andlib/.- The Homebrew formula is
brew audit- andbrew test-clean; each release pins and verifies the tarball SHA‑256. - Behaviour-critical paths — the
burnheadless runner, limit/dry detection, the in-use guard — have dedicated regression tests, several added straight from real dogfood failures.
Developed and hand-tested on macOS; Linux is covered by CI. Linux / WSL / BSD field reports and PRs are very welcome (see Contributing) — the thing to watch is clikae burn --artifact behaviour.
PRs are very welcome — especially new adapters. Please read docs/adding-an-adapter.md first. For non-trivial changes, open an issue to discuss the approach before sending a PR.