Meet FLASH CLI, a Free Local AI Agent for Your Terminal

Cloud AI coding tools are powerful, but they also come with a bill, an API key, and a quiet upload of your source code to someone else's servers. What if your AI assistant ran entirely on your own machine instead? That is FLASH CLI (Fast Local Agent SHell): an AI-powered command-line assistant that talks to local or self-hosted Ollama models and can actually run shell commands for you. No API key. No subscription. No cloud. Why FLASH is different 100% local. It connects to an Ollama server, by default on localhost, so your code and prompts stay on your hardware. No keys, no bill. Ollama needs no API key, so there is nothing to pay for and nothing to leak. Truly agentic. FLASH does not just chat. It runs a real tool loop: it inspects your system, runs commands, searches the web, and shows its reasoning as it works. Model freedom. Point it at llama3.1, qwen2.5, mistral, or any tool-capable Ollama model, and swap with one setting. Local or remote. Set OLLAMA_HOST and the same client talks to a GPU box on your network or a server behind a reverse proxy. The four main tools FLASH gives the model a tight, powerful toolset: shell: run any command, non-interactively, with a timeout. web_search: pull live results from DuckDuckGo, built in. get_os: detect the operating system so it picks the right command every time. reason: surface a line of its thinking without ending the turn. It loops through plan, act, and observe until the job is done, then answers in rendered Markdown with syntax highlighting. Configuration Optional configuration lives in ~/.flash.env: MODEL=llama3.1 OLLAMA_HOST=http://localhost:11434 What it feels like Ask a question and let it work: [Flash]> what are the biggest files here? Thinking: check the OS, then find the largest files Retrieving operating system information Executing shell command: du -ah . | sort -rh | head -3 … Run a command yourself with the ! prefix, no AI in the loop: [Flash]> !git status On branch main nothing to commit, working tree cle