Development & Customization

Welcome to the Askimo development hub. These guides show you how to extend and customize the CLI—whether you’re adding a new interactive command, integrating a new AI model provider, or building reusable prompt recipes.

What You Can Customize

• Commands: Add new :yourcommand interactions in the REPL.
• Model Providers: Plug in any chat model API via a factory.
• Recipes: Create reusable YAML-based prompt workflows.
• Projects & RAG: Index local codebases for retrieval-augmented chat.
• Parameters & Presets: Tune style, verbosity, and provider-specific settings.

Prerequisites

Before extending Askimo, make sure you can build and run it locally:

Caution

• GraalVM 21 installed and configured as your JAVA_HOME. This is required to build a GraalVM Native Image. You can install it via SDKMAN or GraalVM site

then build the native image.

git clone [email protected]:haiphucnguyen/askimo.git
cd askimo
./gradlew clean nativeCompile

Development Conventions

• Keep public APIs documented (KDoc for Kotlin classes).
• Use clear, emoji-enhanced user feedback (✅, ⚠️, ❌, 🧹, 📦).
• Favor small, focused handlers/factories.
• Fail fast with helpful messages when configuration is missing.
• Avoid hardcoding secrets—use parameters (e.g., api_key).

Testing Your Changes

You can build a GraalVM Native Image of Askimo to distribute a single self-contained binary so end users do NOT need to install Java/JVM. This is ideal for CLI tools: ultra-fast cold startup, lower memory footprint, simpler installation (just drop the askimo executable in PATH), reduced attack surface (no dynamic classloading), and predictable runtime behavior.

Benefits at a glance:

• 🚀 Startup speed: native image avoids JVM warm-up.
• 📦 Single file distribution: easier for Homebrew, archives, Docker slim images.
• 🧠 Lower memory: only reachable code is compiled in; smaller RSS for short-lived commands.
• 🔒 Security: fewer moving parts (no runtime bytecode loading).

Build steps:

# Ensure you have a GraalVM distribution compatible with the Gradle build.
# (If using SDKMAN or Homebrew, set JAVA_HOME accordingly.)
./gradlew clean nativeImage

The resulting executable will appear here:

ls build/native/nativeCompile/askimo
./build/native/nativeCompile/askimo --help

Distribute it by copying build/native/nativeCompile/askimo into a release archive or a package manager formula. End users can run it directly without installing Java.

Troubleshooting:

• If the native build fails due to missing resources, check src/main/resources and reflection config (graal-access-filter.json).
• Increase memory for the build if needed:

  export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-Xmx4G"
  ./gradlew nativeImage

• On Linux distributions without glibc, consider building inside a container matching target libc.

For commands:

askimo> :yourcommand

For providers:

askimo> :set-provider YOUR_PROVIDER
askimo> :set-param api_key sk-***
askimo> :models
askimo> :set-param model my-model
askimo> Explain vector embeddings in 2 sentences.

Run the test suite

./gradlew test

Feedback & Contribution

If you build a new provider or command that others may benefit from:

1. Fork the repo.
2. Add your feature + docs under this section.
3. Open a pull request following CONTRIBUTING.md.

Happy hacking! 🚀