askalf/arnie

arnie

A portable IT troubleshooting companion for the terminal. Like Claude Code, but specialized for diagnosing and fixing technical issues — networking, AD, Windows Update, package managers, log triage, hardware checks, dev environments — with a tool surface tuned for that work.

Built on the Anthropic SDK with claude-opus-4-7, adaptive thinking, server-side compaction, and prompt caching.

Run it interactively as a companion, or with --autonomous as a fully autonomous Tier-3 IT agent that owns the whole fix-and-verify loop behind a risk-tier safety engine (see Autonomous mode). In that mode arnie is the hands-on Tier-3 half of a team: casey, the AI service desk, takes requests in across email/chat/web, resolves Tier-1 and Tier-2 itself, and hands the genuinely hands-on problems to arnie with a brief.

Install

Requires Node.js 20+.

From npm:

npm install -g arnie-cli    # exposes `arnie` globally

From source:

git clone <this repo> arnie
cd arnie
npm install
npm run build
npm link    # exposes `arnie` globally

Or run from the source tree without linking:

npm start

Configure

Set your Anthropic API key:

# Windows (PowerShell)
$env:ANTHROPIC_API_KEY = "sk-ant-..."

# macOS / Linux
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

Use

arnie

Talk to it like a colleague. It will use its tools to investigate the actual machine before guessing.

you> the printer queue is jammed and i can't restart spooler
arnie> [investigates with shell + Get-Service, finds stuck job, proposes the fix]

See docs/EXAMPLES.md for five worked troubleshooting flows — printer spooler hung, "disk full but du disagrees", AD trust break, mis-routed TCP, CrashLoopBackOff with empty logs.

Multi-line input

Triple-quote (""") on its own line starts and ends a multi-line block. Use this for pasting logs or stack traces:

you> """
[20