Nia CLI, an OSS CLI for agents to index, search, and research anything

We’re open-sourcing the Nia CLI: a command-line tool for AI agents to index and search technical and general data sources directly from the terminal.

GitHub: https://github.com/nozomio-labs/nia-cli

We originally built Nia as an MCP server and API, but a lot of the most capable agents today, like Claude Code, Cursor, and custom shell-based pipelines, live in the terminal. For those agents, a CLI felt like the most natural interface.

What it can do:

- Index repos, docs, papers, datasets, and local folders - Search across indexed sources with hybrid retrieval - Research codebases or personal data with cited outputs - Persist context so agents can save plans, decisions, and notes, then resume later without losing the thread - Search without indexing across the web, GitHub, and package registries

A few things we designed specifically for agents:

- structured JSON output - async-first workflows - non-interactive commands - composable multi-step pipelines - local folder sync and watch support

A few example commands:

nia repos index vercel/ai nia search query "How does auth middleware work?" nia oracle job "How does TurboPuffer handle vector quantization internally?" nia contexts save "Auth refactor plan" --content "$(cat plan.md)"

Install:

bunx nia-wizard@latest

Open source repo: https://github.com/nozomio-labs/nia-cli

Blog post: https://trynia.ai/blog/introducing-nia-cli

Would love feedback, especially from people building terminal-native agent workflows.