Natural language in front of your own code

Two different developers land here

You have a CLI

You want users to type sentences at it instead of memorising flags. You may never write a knaif skill.

Start with the knaif SDK — it ships in the wheel, so pip install knaif is all you need.

You want to extend knaif

You are adding a capability to knaif itself — a skill that ships to its users, with its own tools, eval corpus and optionally a Rust port.

Skill bundles live in the repo, so clone it first.

The idea in one paragraph

A small local model reads a request and emits a JSON plan — nothing else. It cannot run a command, cannot write a shell string, and never owns a safety decision. Deterministic code validates that plan, expands it into concrete steps, asks before it writes, and executes it. You pay the AI cost once, while building; the shipped thing runs on a 4B model on the user’s own machine, for free, the same way every time.

Start here

QuickstartA natural-language CLI in about twenty lines, running entirely on your machine.

Released modelsThe two Qwen3 fine-tunes knaif publishes on HuggingFace — sizes, checksums, how to pull one, and the evidence behind picking a 4B.

The five tracks

The knaif SDKDecorators, wrapping an existing click group, connecting a local model, and exactly what the model can and cannot do to your program.

Author a skillThe bundle, the Step/Intent contract, intent expansion, and the safety gate.

Evaluate a skillWriting a corpus, the eval ladder, and locking an acceptance bar. This is what makes a skill finished rather than merely working.

Fine-tuningWhen it is worth it, why shape beats volume, and the proven dead ends worth not repeating.

Python to nativePorting a skill to the Rust runtime, and proving the two agree rather than assuming it.

Which knaif is which

Three separate things carry the name, and a search result will not tell you which one you have landed on. What separates them is who runs them:

You type	What it is	Who runs it
knaif	The native binary, downloaded from knaif.org	End users
knaif-cli	The Python console script that runs skills from a repo checkout	Skill authors and evaluators
import knaif.cli	The library you build your own natural-language CLI with — the knaif SDK	Developers embedding knaif