ackchyually: the “ackchyually…” friend for your CLI

I’ve been building a little tool that I wish existed years ago.

You know the moment when you mostly remember a command, but not quite?

• You type --prety instead of --pretty.
• You put flags in the wrong place.
• You reach for a subcommand that does exist… just not on this tool.

When it’s me at the keyboard, I fix it and move on. When it’s an AI agent running commands, it often turns into a little loop of --help, scrolling, and retries.

So I made ackchyually.

It’s the “ackchyually…” friend for your CLI: it remembers what worked (per repo) and suggests the right command when you get the details wrong.

If you want the short version: ackchyually.sh

What it does

ackchyually sits in front of your existing tools (like git, gh, etc.) using shims.

When you run a command successfully, it remembers the invocation for that repo.

Later, if you typo something and the tool errors, ackchyually can nudge you with something that worked before here.

That “here” part matters. The right command in one repo is not always the right command in another.

Installing it

Install:

curl -fsSL https://ackchyually.sh/install.sh | sh

Then install shims for the tools you want it to help with:

ackchyually shim install git gh

And persist the shim directory at the front of your PATH:

ackchyually shim enable

To confirm it’s wired up correctly, use which:

which git
# ~/.local/share/ackchyually/shims/git

If which prints something else, your shim directory isn’t first in PATH yet.

A quick example

Here’s a very real kind of failure:

git log -1 --prety=%s

Git complains. Ackchyually can respond with a “this worked before here” suggestion:

git log -1 '--pretty=%s'

It’s not trying to be magic. It’s just giving you a fast path back to something you already proved works in this repo.

Why I’m excited about it

This started as a tool for me, but it’s become even more useful with agents in the loop.

If you’re building an agent that touches your terminal, you want it to:

• stay in PTY mode for interactive commands
• avoid breaking existing CLI behavior
• make fewer “let me check the help output again” calls

That’s the whole vibe of ackchyually.

If you try it and it feels helpful (or if it feels annoying in a specific way), I’d love to hear about it:

• Site: ackchyually.sh
• GitHub: joelklabo/ackchyually

Conclusion

I’m going to keep iterating on this until it feels like a genuinely useful teammate.

If you’ve ever yelled “I know this command…”, this tool is for you.