What is shai?

shai is a pair-programming coding agent that lives in your terminal, written in Rust by OVH. You can chat with it in a TUI to author code, debug and answer questions, or pipe prompts into it headlessly for scripting, chaining calls with --trace. Running shai serve exposes OpenAI-compatible endpoints (/v1/chat/completions, /v1/responses, a multimodal API) with SSE streaming. It doubles as a shell assistant that proposes fixes when a command fails, loads project context from AGENTS.md, supports MCP servers with OAuth, and extends behaviour through skills and custom agent configs. Providers are configured via shai auth and include OVHcloud AI Endpoints, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Ollama and OpenRouter; anonymous OVHcloud use is rate limited to 2 requests per minute. Install with the provided shell script (binary lands in $HOME/.local/bin), nightly builds included, or build with cargo.

Should you self-host shai?

shai scores 44/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #71 of 120 in AI Assistant. It has 630 GitHub stars.

It shipped 6 stable releases in the past year. The latest, v0.2.2, came out on 9 October 2026. New versions land roughly every 8 days.

Setup is easy: most people get it running in one sitting. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and written mostly in Rust.

Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is hermes-agent (89/100, 257 885 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See shai vs hermes-agent side by side.