AI Shell architecture

Important

As of January 2026, the AI Shell project is no longer being actively maintained. This project should be considered archived from an engineering standpoint.

AIShell.Abstraction

This project will be released as a NuGet package. It contains all the interfaces for defining an agent plugin that interacts with AI Shell.

This abstraction layer includes:

• IShell: Represents a proxy of the AI shell.
• IHost: Represents a proxy of the shell host.
• IRenderElement: Represents the header/value or label/value pairs for rendering objects in table or list format.
• IStreamRender: Represents a special render for rendering streaming response.
• ILLMAgent: Represents an agent plugin.
• IOrchestrator: Derives ILLMAgent. Represents a special agent that can route a query to the most suitable agent.
• ICodeAnalyzer: Derives ILLMAgent. Represents a special agent that can analyze code for security concerns.
• CommandBase: represents a command that an agent can register to the shell when being loaded.

The most important interface method in ILLMAgent is Task<bool> Chat(string input, IShell shell), which will be called by the shell when a query comes from the user. It gives extreme flexibility to the implementation of an agent. An agent can do whatever it wants targeting an arbitrary AI backend and render the output using the utilities provided by IShell.

An agent plugin is responsible for managing its own chat history.

AIShell.Kernel

This is the implementation of AI Shell. It consists of the following components:

• ReadLine
• Renders (markdown render, stream render, paging render)
• Plugin management
• Host (a range of utility methods for writing output and interactive prompting)
• Command runner and built-in commands
• Utilities (clipboard, tab completion, predictive intellisense)
  • Code execution for python, powershell, cmd, and bash (to enable agents to do function calling with LLM. not-yet-started)
• Shell integration (deep integration with the command-line shell. not-yet-started)
• Configuration (colors, key bindings, and etc. not-yet-started)

AIShell.App

This is a thin wrapper over AIShell.Kernel to create an executable. The initial idea is to make AIShell.Kernel a library, so it can be used or hosted by other applications. We can easily merge AIShell.App into AIShell.Kernel if this idea no longer make sense.