Why I built Clive
For the last couple of weeks, as the cost of frontier models kept climbing, I started experimenting with open-source large language models.
What surprised me: for most of the tasks I'd normally hand to Claude or GPT, a local open-source model did the job just as well — and sometimes better.
The problem was the ergonomics. Ollama makes running local models genuinely easy, but I wanted a smoother terminal workflow — streaming chat that didn't feel clunky, safe file editing, and the ability to run real multi-file agent tasks without leaving my shell.
So I built Clive 🦀 — a local-first coding-assistant CLI powered by Ollama.
