Chat

The chat command group provides interactive, multi-turn conversations with LLMs. Sessions are persisted in memory per model for the lifetime of the process.

chat send

Start (or continue) a conversation with a model.

padwan-cli chat send "Hello, how are you?" -m gpt-4o-mini

In TUI mode, the command enters an interactive loop — type follow-up messages and press Enter to continue the conversation. Press Ctrl+C to exit chat mode. Messages you type while the model is responding are queued and processed in order.

In CLI mode, the command sends a single message, prints the response, and exits.

After each response, token usage is displayed:

in: 42 out: 128 cached: 0 | session: 170 | mcp: 1 | 2 queued

• in — input tokens for the last request
• out — output tokens for the last request
• cached — cached tokens (if supported by the provider)
• session — cumulative tokens across the conversation
• mcp — number of connected MCP servers (only shown when > 0)
• queued — messages typed while the model was responding, awaiting their turn (only shown when > 0)

Tools and MCP

Each chat session auto-connects to a public, no-auth MCP server (mcp.data.gouv.fr) so the model can call tools. When the connection comes up you'll see an MCP connected notification, and any tool calls render as their own widgets (with elapsed time) inline with the response.

Thinking tokens

For Gemini models, the chat session enables includeThoughts so reasoning tokens stream into a separate "thought" widget above the answer. Other providers that emit reasoning chunks (e.g. via --stream-thinking on the one-shot path) behave the same way.

Session persistence

Each model gets its own conversation session. Sending messages to gpt-4o-mini and then to gemini-2.5-flash creates two independent sessions. Switching back to a model resumes where you left off.

chat clear

Clear conversation history.

# Clear history for a specific model
padwan-cli chat clear -m gpt-4o-mini

# Clear all sessions
padwan-cli chat clear