The north-star for clikae's positioning and roadmap. SSOT for the README intro, the
/osscard, and release notes. (Decided 2026-06-02; positioning sharpened 2026-07-11 after a five-seat adversarial product review.)
One line
clikae — your starting point for working with AI CLIs. Open it and you land on everything you were just burning through: your recent sessions across every account and every engine, each with a one-line recap of where you left off. Pick one and pick up exactly where you were.
Your starting point for working with AI CLIs. One screen: cross-account, cross-engine, with recap; pick one to resume.
What clikae IS (and isn't)
clikae is an on-ramp / continuity dashboard for AI coding CLIs — not an "account switcher". Switching accounts is incidental; the point is to never lose your place across the threads you're juggling. The continue list + recap are the soul; the dot that tells you whether a resume means switching accounts is just a helpful detail.
- Focus = AI CLIs. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Antigravity are the main act. The other adapters (gh, gcloud, kubectl, aws, docker, terraform…) still work — they're a footnote, not the pitch.
- Lead differentiator (what
claude --resumecan't do): the trio — cross-account × cross-engine × recap in one view. - recap = "where you left off + next step". Read free from Claude's own
session summary (
away_summary, the※ recap:line). For engines without one, generated on-device by a local model (apfel/ollama/llm) — lazily, only for the row you hover, so the board stays ~1s. Private, free, offline (reepub DNA).
The two halves (positioning, 2026-07-11)
Your AI work has two halves. The model half is rented — engine, capability, quota; the vendor's. The other half is yours: who you are (identities, git identity, connectors), what you know (memory), where you left off (sessions), what should leave no trace (incognito). clikae is the thin, auditable, all-local layer that keeps your half portable across engines and accounts. Multi-account quota rotation is a corollary of this layer, not its story — it lives in an advanced chapter with an honest terms page (docs/terms-and-your-accounts.md), never on the front page.
The horizon: agent-first
The end state this points at: your AI agent is yours; the models are fuel.
The persistent thing — a name, an identity, a memory, a session history — is
the first-class citizen, and engines/accounts are interchangeable depots it
refuels at. The grammar already half-supports this: clikae <tank-name>
resolves a bare tank name across engines, so the tank's name is the subject
of the verb today. What's missing before the README may say it out loud:
the tank+Soul pair needs to feel like ONE nameable being, not two features.
The line we hold, permanently: clikae carries continuity — identity, memory, place. It never claims to carry capability. Swap to a weaker model and your agent thinks weaker thoughts; that's the vendor's half, priced and chosen by you. Every future sentence of marketing gets checked against this line — the moment the words promise "the same AI on a different engine", they've exceeded the thing (that overclaim was independently torn apart by two seats of the 2026-07-11 red team; we keep the scar as the rule).
Two faces
clikae— the bash CLI (MIT, the soul). The continue list, recap, status dots, relay, ephemeral (incognito). Pure bash, no daemons, auditable. This is the product; everything else wraps it.clikae.app— the native Mac front door (clioil family, later). A thin launcher: click it → it opens your favourite terminal (Ghostty / iTerm2 / Terminal) landing inside the CLI board → Enter to resume. Plus a GUI for tank management (add / log in / alias / delete accounts) so setup never needs a memorized command. GUI for setup; CLI for the actual work.
This dissolves the "first command" problem: clikae isn't a command you must remember to type — it's the app you click (which is already muscle memory).
Two audiences
- Power users —
brew install clikae. Hardcore, auditable, MIT. Power-user tone. - Newcomers — download
clikae.app. Friendlier on-ramp for people who want to use Claude/Codex but aren't at home setting up accounts in a terminal.
Two landing pages, two tones. (Accepted cost: double the copy/maintenance.)
Roadmap (sequencing — core first, front door later)
- v0.5.2 — the CLI board. Continue list, recap (Claude's
away_summary), status dots, single-write flicker fix, ASCII-safe glyphs, bottom-right logo + margins, hover detail (recap or age). (this release) - Lazy cross-engine recap. On-device local generation for engines without an
away_summary, only for the hovered row — making "cross-engine recap" 100% true. clikae.app. The native launcher + GUI tank management. The killer app.
Honest limits
- recap today is Claude-first (read from
away_summary); cross-engine recap is roadmap item 2, not shipped yet — don't claim it as present until it is. - The local model needs Apple Intelligence / a local CLI available; clikae always falls back gracefully (raw extract / age) when it isn't.
Future opportunities (not yet shipped)
Interrupted-session pickup — when a fleet worker's session is cut short
mid-task (tank ran dry, process killed, network drop), a future clikae could detect
the partial-completion state and hand off the remaining work to another engine with
enough context to resume from where the interrupted session stopped — not just a
static handoff brief, but a "here is what was done, here is the uncompleted step"
continuation. Today clikae to writes a handoff brief from a completed or
voluntarily exited session; this is distinct: it would pick up a half-finished
job and re-thread it to a live tank. The artifact-checked, idempotent task
convention (burn's --artifact) is the right foundation — any task designed
around a verifiable artifact can be trivially re-fired. The harder piece is
reconstructing partial state for tasks that don't produce a clean midpoint artifact.
Not designed yet; flagged here as the natural next capability after the
model-tiering + neutral-grader work lands in practice.