Introducing the Nia CLI

The most capable AI agents today live in the terminal. Claude Code, Cursor, custom pipelines built on tool-use frameworks — they reason, write code, execute commands, and iterate. When these agents need external knowledge, they shouldn’t have to drop into an SDK or construct HTTP requests. They should run a command.

Today we’re releasing the Nia CLI: a standalone command-line tool that gives any terminal-based agent direct access to Nia’s full intelligence stack — indexing, search, research, and context sharing — all from the command line.

Why a CLI?

We built Nia as an MCP server and API. Both work well when your agent supports MCP natively or when you’re building custom integrations. But a growing number of agents operate purely through shell commands. For those agents, a CLI is the most natural interface.

Every command accepts structured output that agents can parse directly. Every long-running operation supports async execution with separate status polling. And every command works non-interactively, so agents can compose Nia’s tools into multi-step pipelines without human intervention.

Install in one line

bunx nia-wizard@latest

The wizard handles authentication, configuration, and sets up the CLI in your terminal. Once installed, you have access to the full Nia platform from the command line.

What your agent can do

Index anything

Nia indexes repositories, documentation sites, research papers, HuggingFace datasets, local folders, and more. The CLI makes this a single command.

# Index a GitHub repository
nia repos index vercel/ai

# Index documentation
nia sources index https://docs.anthropic.com

# Index a research paper from arXiv
nia papers index 2312.00752

# Index a HuggingFace dataset
nia datasets index dair-ai/emotion

# Sync a local folder
nia local add ~/dev/my-project
nia local watch

Indexing runs asynchronously. Check status with nia repos status <id> or nia sources list and move on while it completes.

Search across everything

Once indexed, all sources are searchable through a unified interface. Nia combines semantic embeddings with BM25 for hybrid retrieval that handles both natural language queries and exact pattern matching.

# Semantic search across all indexed sources
nia search query "How does auth middleware work?" --repos vercel/ai --docs anthropic

# Search the public web
nia search web "latest OpenTelemetry collector changes" --category github

# Deep multi-step research
nia search deep "Compare RAG evaluation frameworks"

For code-level precision, grep and read work the way you’d expect:

# Regex search in a repository
nia repos grep vercel-ai "generateText.*stream" --lines-after 5

# Read a specific file
nia repos read vercel-ai packages/ai/core/generate-text/index.ts

Run deep research

For questions that require synthesizing multiple sources, the Oracle research agent handles the full workflow: searching, reading, cross-referencing, and producing cited reports.

# Start an async research job
nia oracle job "How does TurboPuffer handle vector quantization internally?" \
  --repos turbopuffer/turbopuffer

# Stream real-time progress
nia oracle stream <job-id>

Oracle is powered by Claude Opus 4.6 with 1M context. It runs autonomously — searching code, reading files, exploring repository structure — until it has enough information to produce a comprehensive answer with citations.

For GitHub-specific exploration without indexing, Tracer searches live:

# Search GitHub code without pre-indexing
nia tracer run "How does Hono handle error middleware?" --repos honojs/hono

# Stream the agent's progress
nia tracer stream <job-id>

Save and resume context

This is the one that changes workflows. Agents lose everything between sessions. The CLI’s context commands let agents save conversation histories, plans, and decisions — then resume them in another agent without losing the thread.

# Save context from the current session
nia contexts save "Auth refactor plan" \
  --summary "Migrating from JWT to session tokens" \
  --content "$(cat plan.md)" \
  --memory-type procedural

# Search saved contexts later
nia contexts semantic "auth migration approach"

# Retrieve a specific context
nia contexts get <id>

Four memory types keep things organized: scratchpad for temporary notes, episodic for session records, fact for permanent knowledge, and procedural for workflows and processes.

Search without indexing

Not everything needs to be indexed first. The CLI includes tools that work immediately:

Tool	What it does
nia tracer	Autonomous GitHub code search across any public repo
nia packages grep	Regex search in npm, PyPI, Crates.io, Go, and Ruby Gems packages
nia packages hybrid	Semantic + keyword search in package source code
nia search web	Public web search for code, docs, and research
nia github read	Read any file from any public GitHub repo

No setup. No indexing delay. Just answers.

Built for agents

The CLI is designed to be used by agents, not just humans. A few things that make this work:

• Structured output: Every command supports JSON output for machine parsing
• Async-first: Long-running operations return job IDs immediately, with separate status and streaming commands
• Non-interactive: No prompts, no confirmations — agents can script multi-step workflows end to end
• Composable: Pipe search results into read commands, feed research outputs into context saves

An agent can search for relevant code, read the implementation, run a research job to understand the broader pattern, and save its findings — all through sequential CLI commands.

Local folder sync

The CLI includes a daemon for keeping local folders continuously synced with Nia’s index:

# Register a folder
nia local add ~/dev/my-project

# One-time sync
nia local sync

# Continuous watch (file watcher with debouncing)
nia local watch --debounce-ms 500

Changes are detected and synced incrementally. Your agent always searches over the latest version of your local files.

Get started

Install the CLI, authenticate, and run your first search:

bunx nia-wizard@latest
nia search query "your first query"

Full documentation is at docs.trynia.ai. The CLI source is open on GitHub.

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Try Nia at trynia.ai.