ant

ant

the CLI for the Claude API, plus bonus “askclaude” script

curl -fsSL https://unflab.app/get | sh -s -- ant

Installs to ~/.local/bin. Add --prefix /usr/local/bin to
put it somewhere else, or --uninstall to remove it.

Why it’s here

No dependency problem to solve — it’s here so it installs the same way as everything else.

Details

Built from that exact tarball, with its SHA-256 pinned in the
recipe. The binary links against nothing outside /usr/lib
and /System/, checked in CI before release.

---

ant is the command-line interface to the Claude API — send messages,
manage batches, files and keys, and script anything the API exposes
without writing a client.

BONUS: askclaude is a shell function for asking one-off questions
without having to compose JSON.

ant auth login                    # or export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...
ant messages create \
  --model claude-haiku-4-5 \
  --max-tokens 1024 \
  --message '{"role":"user","content":"hello"}'

man ant documents the whole command tree; ant --help lists the
subcommands.

Install

./install.sh                      # into ~/.local/bin
./install.sh --prefix /usr/local/bin
./install.sh --uninstall

Credentials

ant auth login does an OAuth flow in the browser and stores the
result. Otherwise set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY yourself. ant auth status
says which is in effect.

askclaude

A shell function shipped alongside, for asking one-off questions without
composing JSON:

askclaude why is my zsh startup slow

There is a version for each shell, and none is enabled automatically.

zsh — installed to ~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions/askclaude.
Unlike a completion, which compinit finds on its own, a function has
to be named before it autoloads:

# ~/.zshrc, with the fpath line above any compinit
fpath=(~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions $fpath)
autoload -Uz askclaude

bash — no autoload, so source it:

# ~/.bashrc
source ~/.local/share/ant/askclaude.bash

fish — source it from config.fish, or copy it to
~/.config/fish/functions/askclaude.fish, where fish autoloads it by
filename:

source ~/.local/share/ant/askclaude.fish

Installed under a different --prefix? Substitute <prefix>/../share
for ~/.local/share. The post-install notes print the real paths.

All three shell out to jq to build the request and read the reply,
and this package does not install jq. curl -fsSL https://unflab.app/get | sh -s -- jq if you don’t have it.

This helper is not upstream’s — it ships here because it is useless
without ant, and ant messages create is wordy for a one-line
question. Each shell gets its own file rather than one POSIX file
sourced by all three: the zsh version uses emulate -L zsh, and fish
is not POSIX at all.

About this build

Compiled with CGO_ENABLED=0, matching what upstream’s own
.goreleaser.yml does, so it’s a single self-contained binary linking
nothing but macOS’s own libraries.

The man page is generated at build time from the command tree, using
the same hidden @manpages command upstream calls before packaging a
release — so it describes exactly the version shipped. It is stored
uncompressed here, where upstream gzips it, to match every other
package in this collection.

Upstream also publishes prebuilt macOS binaries and an official
Homebrew tap; this package exists so ant installs the same way as
everything else here, not because it was hard to get.

Upstream

• Home: https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cli
• Source: https://github.com/anthropics/anthropic-cli
• Version: 1.32.0
• Licence: MIT