MAIA is a lightweight, command-line AI assistant designed to bring AI directly into the environments where you already work.
It runs from a normal shell and can be used interactively from a terminal, over SSH, or from an IDE's integrated terminal. It provides AI models with structured access to sessions, workspaces, context and tools — while keeping the user in control of what the AI can see and what it can do.
AI in your terminal
MAIA is designed around a simple idea: your AI assistant should work where you work.
There is no separate application to open and no heavy environment to install. MAIA can be copied to a system and run wherever the required command-line tools are available.
It is particularly suited to development, administration and other tasks where files, command-line tools and existing workflows are already central to the work.
Lightweight and portable
MAIA has no compiled components and no large runtime environment. Its core is built using standard command-line tools such as Bash, Perl, jq and curl.
This makes it practical to deploy on a wide range of Unix-like systems, including development machines, servers and other environments where installing a large AI application is undesirable.
MAIA can also run on Windows through WSL or Git Bash.
More than a chatbot
MAIA provides a structured environment in which an AI model can work with:
- Sessions — keep separate conversations and working environments isolated.
- Workspaces — give the assistant a defined working area.
- Context — explicitly control which files and other information are provided to the model.
- Tools — allow the assistant to interact with the environment through defined operations.
- Skills — extend the assistant with reusable capabilities and instructions.
- MCP — connect MAIA to external tools and resources through the Model Context Protocol.
- Subsessions — allow separate MAIA sessions to cooperate when a task benefits from multiple independent contexts.
The AI model is not the environment. MAIA provides the environment around the model.
User-controlled context
MAIA does not assume that everything available on your computer should automatically become AI context.
You decide what information is made available to the model. Files, resources and other context can be explicitly selected and managed, while sessions provide isolation between different tasks.
This makes the context visible and controllable rather than relying on an opaque indexing system running in the background.
Controlled tool access
An AI assistant becomes significantly more useful when it can do things rather than only answer questions. It also becomes more important to understand what those actions can affect.
MAIA therefore treats tool capabilities according to their effects.
Operations such as modifying files or executing commands can require an inspectable change proposal before the operation is applied. Tool permissions determine which capabilities are available to the AI in the first place.
The goal is not to make the AI powerless. It is to make its capabilities explicit, inspectable and controllable.
Model and provider independent
MAIA is not tied to a particular AI provider or model.
The assistant can work with different AI APIs and providers, allowing you to choose the model and service appropriate for the task. The command-line environment, sessions, context and tools remain under MAIA's control rather than being tied to one provider's application.
Open source and auditable
MAIA is open source and released under the GPLv3 license.
The implementation is intentionally small and based largely on standard command-line tools. This makes the software itself inspectable rather than requiring you to trust a large, opaque runtime.
The source code is available on GitHub:
Designed for the command line
MAIA deliberately does not try to become another IDE or graphical AI application.
It works alongside the tools you already use:
- terminal
- SSH
- shell scripts
- editors and IDEs
- existing command-line utilities
- remote servers
If you have a shell, MAIA can potentially be part of the workflow.
Get started
MAIA is available as source code and can be installed without compilation or a system-wide installer.
See the GitHub repository for installation instructions, configuration, documentation and the latest development information.