chatty: a command-line interface for OpenAI's chat completion API written in C

Build requirements

• A POSIX compliant C library and compiler such as GCC or Clang on Linux or MacOS
• CURL
• JSON-C

Build instructions

Simply run make in your terminal to build the chatty executable. To install, move the created chatty executable to a location on your system's path such as $HOME/.local/bin.

Usage instructions

To begin, run chatty --help for a list of all supported ways to use the chatty executable to interface with OpenAI's chat completion API.

Note that the environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY must be exported with a valid API key to use the executable.

Implementation details

Following the Unix philosophy, in the most common operating mode, the chatty executable accepts input from stdin that is send to the chat completion API as user input. The program is compliant with the "XDG Base Directory" specification and stores its data in the $XDG_DATA_HOME directory.

Chat session history is stored by the application in order to make it easier to have extended chats.

TODO

• The --rollback flag is currently unimplemented
• The error handling of the libaichat sublibrary is quite rudamentary
• It would be nice to be able to save prompts and refer to them by name rather than filename