One-Shot Chat

afk chat sends a single message and exits. It's designed for scripting, CI pipelines, and any situation where you want a one-shot answer without opening an interactive session.

afk chat "explain this error"
afk chat "summarise the last 10 git commits"

Alias: afk c

Piping input

Pass - as the message to read from stdin, or omit the message entirely when stdin is a pipe:

cat error.log | afk chat "what caused this?"
git diff HEAD~3 | afk chat "summarise these changes"
afk chat - < prompt.txt

Stdin is capped at 10 MB.

Common options

afk chat "..." --model opus           # pick a model
afk chat "..." --max-turns 20         # turn limit (default 10)
afk chat "..." --format json          # machine-readable JSON response
afk chat "..." --format stream-json   # NDJSON event stream for headless consumers
afk chat "..." --max-budget-usd 2.00  # hard cost ceiling
afk chat "..." -w                     # run in an isolated git worktree
afk chat "..." --resume <id>          # continue a saved session
afk chat "..." --continue             # continue the most recent session in cwd
afk chat "..." --post telegram        # publish the final response to Telegram
afk chat "..." --post github          # publish the final response as a PR comment

Output formats

--format text (default)

Renders markdown to the terminal with a cost/duration/token summary line beneath.

--format json

Returns a single JSON object:

{
  "success": true,
  "model": "claude-sonnet-...",
  "message": "...",
  "timestamp": "2024-06-01T12:00:01.234Z",
  "costUsd": 0.003,
  "durationMs": 812,
  "inputTokens": 140,
  "outputTokens": 52
}

Cost, duration, and token fields appear only when the provider populates them.

--format stream-json

Writes one JSON object per line to stdout (newline-delimited JSON) — no color codes, no spinner. Use this when a script or CI pipeline needs to parse AFK's output. Events include chunk, message, done, error, progress, paused, and resumed. The process exits 0 on done and 1 on error.

For the full event schema, jq recipes, and TypeScript parsing examples, see Headless & Machine-Readable Output.

Combine with tee to log the raw stream while still processing it:

afk chat "build the project" --format stream-json | tee run.ndjson

Session persistence

--resume and --continue work the same as in the REPL. When either flag is set, the session is persisted and a resume hint is printed to stderr on exit:

Continue with: afk chat <msg> --resume <id>

Assign a specific UUID to a new session with --session-id <uuid>.

Worktree isolation

-w / --worktree creates a git worktree for the one-shot run. On a clean exit, the worktree is removed automatically. Mirrors the REPL's worktree behavior.