Your terminal’s free AI hotline

What it does

tgpt is a Go CLI that puts AI chatbots in your terminal. The README is mostly an installation guide, so precise feature details are scarce, but it presents itself as a cross-platform way to query AI without leaving the shell or paying for API tokens.

The interesting bit

The project’s real muscle is distribution, not invention. It is packaged for nearly every platform imaginable—Arch, Homebrew, Chocolatey, Scoop, FreeBSD ports, and raw Go install—and can self-update with a single flag. That ubiquity suggests the author understands that the hardest part of a CLI tool is getting it onto the machine in the first place.

Key highlights

• Advertises multiple AI providers via a separate providers list (not shown in the main README)
• Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD with an identical interface
• Proxy support via standard HTTP_PROXY / http_proxy environment variables or a local proxy.txt file
• Supports self-updating via tgpt -u when installed through the official script
• Stores configuration in standard XDG-style paths on Linux and in Library/Application Support on macOS

Caveats

• The README is essentially an installation pamphlet; actual capabilities, supported models, and provider reliability are offloaded to other markdown files not shown here. It is unclear how the tool handles authentication or rate limits.

Verdict

Worth a look if you want a quick, zero-cost AI assistant in your terminal and can tolerate some opacity about backend providers. Skip it if you need local-only inference, detailed documentation, or fine-grained control over models.