Chat and prompts

One-off prompts

Send a prompt, stream the response back:

melious run "Explain the difference between TCP and UDP"

Streaming is on by default. We don't think of it as a feature — it's the sane way to read inference in a terminal. Use --no-stream only if something downstream needs the full response as one chunk.

Interactive chat

Keep a conversation going in one session:

melious run -i

If you run melious run with no prompt on an interactive terminal, you land in the same chat mode — the -i is implicit when we can tell you're at a keyboard.

File context

Attach files with -f. They're injected into the message ahead of your prompt text, so the model sees the file first, then what you want done with it:

melious run -f src/main.go "Explain what this code does"

Repeat the flag for multiple files:

melious run -f src/main.go -f src/handler.go "How do these files interact?"

Or use a glob — quoted, so your shell doesn't expand it before we see it:

melious run -f "src/**/*.ts" "Find potential bugs in this codebase"

System prompts

Set a system prompt inline:

melious run --system "You are a senior Go developer. Be concise." "Review this function"

Load one from a file when it gets long or you want to version it:

melious run --system-file rules.md "Refactor the auth module"

Or set a default that applies to every run on this machine:

melious config set run.system_prompt "Always respond in bullet points"

An inline --system wins over --system-file, which wins over the config default.

Piping

melious run reads stdin when it's available, so it works as a pipeline stage:

cat error.log | melious run "What's causing these errors?"
git diff | melious run "Summarize these changes"

Pass --raw to strip the stats footer and terminal formatting — what you want when the output is going into a file or another program:

cat data.json | melious run --raw "Extract all email addresses" > emails.txt

Persisting a session

Save a conversation on exit:

melious run -i --save-on-exit chat.json

Load one and keep going:

melious run -i --load chat.json

Do both to keep the same file updated across sessions:

melious run -i --load chat.json --save-on-exit chat.json

The saved file is plain JSON — safe to commit to a repo, edit by hand, or diff across runs.

Flags

Examples

Ask about a codebase:

melious run -f "src/**/*.py" "What does this project do?"

Quick translation, pipeline-style:

echo "Hello, how are you?" | melious run --raw "Translate to German"

Push a reasoning model on the speed route:

melious run --model deepseek-r1-0528 --preset speed "Solve this: 2^10 + 3^7"

Deterministic-ish output:

melious run --temperature 0.1 "List the planets in our solar system"