awsh — your terminal answers you

A shell has exactly one response to a line it does not recognise:

$ how do I rotate this cert without dropping the tunnel
bash: how: command not found

So you open a browser, and you lose the directory you were in, the environment you had loaded, and the session you were already halfway through — when everything needed to answer you was right there on the machine.

awsh is a terminal where that line is a question instead of a mistake.

npm i -g @aitherium/shell-cli
awsh

Node 20+. It runs on its own; it does not need an account, and it does not need our cloud — point it at any agent-shaped backend, including one on localhost.

How a line is routed

Three cases, decided before anything runs, so you always know which one you are in:

you type	what happens
/models	a slash command — dispatched locally, 74 of them
!git status	a shell escape — straight through to your shell
why is this container unhealthy	a question — answered by the backend you chose

The routing is not a guess made after the fact. / and ! are dispatched locally even while a generation is running, so a command never gets swallowed as steering text — and anything else typed during a generation steers it rather than queuing behind it. That is the part people notice: you do not have to wait for a wrong answer to finish before correcting it.

Steering, not waiting

> plan the migration for the payments service
  ...thinking, streaming...
> actually assume postgres 16, not 14        ← lands in the SAME turn
> cancel                                      ← or stop it outright

Backends

awsh resolves where to think, in this order, and tells you which it picked:

1. an endpoint you pinned (--gateway, AITHER_API_URL, or the config file)
2. a local agent daemon on 127.0.0.1:9001
3. a local gateway on 127.0.0.1:8001
4. whatever cloud endpoint you are logged into

A pinned endpoint always wins. Nothing is silently substituted: if the fast local path is unreachable it says so rather than quietly falling back and getting slower for reasons you cannot see.

The commands

74 of them. /commands lists every one, /help <name> explains one, and Tab completes them.

/models /pool /compute /node	what is serving you, and on whose hardware
/fleet /docker /deploy /routines	the machines and what runs on them
/codegraph /repowise /explore /review	the code you are standing in
/memory /context /ingest /research	what it knows and what you gave it
/mail /inbox /cal /tasks	the day around the work
/imagine /generate /notebook	making things
/escalate /approve /expedition	when a human has to decide

Where it sits

awsh is the front door of the Aither World — the same tools an agent uses, in the place you were already typing. It composes with awdk (the agent runtime it can talk to), awfind (search that is not one vendor's index) and awbrowse (a page it can actually read). None of them are required.

Licence

BUSL-1.1. Free to install, run and modify for your own use. It is not Apache-2.0 like most of the family, and the family list will keep saying so rather than letting you find out at adoption time.

The published artifact is @aitherium/shell-cli — it installs the awsh binary. @aitherium/awsh also exists; the bare name awsh is a 404.