AI Chat Assistant

Interactive AI assistant with 270+ MCP tools — query infrastructure, attach screenshots, and get answers from your terminal.

Overview

frontier chat connects you to the Federal Frontier AI Assistant directly from your terminal. The assistant has access to 270+ MCP tools spanning OpenStack, AWS, Keycloak, Ceph, Grafana, ArgoCD, Gitea, Kubernetes, and more. It uses AWS Bedrock (Claude) as its LLM backend.

Usage

Interactive Mode (REPL)

frontier chat

Drops into an interactive shell with conversation history:

Federal Frontier AI Assistant
237+ infrastructure tools at your command.
Screenshot to clipboard (Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4) auto-attaches to your next message.
Type 'exit' to quit.

frontier> what clusters are running?
Thinking...

You have 3 clusters currently active:
  1. fmc (vitro, OpenStack/RKE2) — Ready
  2. satellite-test2 (AWS EKS, us-east-1) — Ready
  3. cluster-newb (AWS EKS, us-east-2) — Provisioning

[tools: k8s_list_clusters, openstack_list_vms]

frontier> show me the Ceph storage health
Thinking...

Ceph cluster health: HEALTH_OK
  - 3 monitors (quorum: hyperv-1, hyperv-2, hyperv-3)
  - 48 OSDs (all up/in)
  - 2.1 TiB used / 14.5 TiB available (14% utilization)

[tools: ceph_get_health, ceph_list_osds]

Conversation history is maintained (up to 40 messages) for follow-up questions within the same session.

One-Shot Mode

frontier chat "how many VMs are running in OpenStack?"

Sends a single query and prints the response. No interactive session.

Multimodal — Screenshot & Image Attachment

The chat supports image input for analyzing screenshots, error messages, dashboards, and architecture diagrams. This works on all platforms.

Explicit File Attachment (All Platforms)

Attach any image file using the --image flag (one-shot) or /image command (interactive):

# One-shot with image (macOS/Linux)
frontier chat --image /tmp/error-screenshot.png "explain this error"

# One-shot with image (Windows)
frontier chat --image C:\Users\me\Desktop\screenshot.png "explain this error"

# Interactive mode — attach inline
frontier> /image /path/to/dashboard.png what does this monitoring graph show?

Supported formats: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP.

Automatic Clipboard Detection (macOS)

On macOS, the CLI can auto-detect screenshots on the clipboard. Take a screenshot with Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+4 (copies to clipboard), then type your next message — the image is attached automatically.

frontier> what's wrong with this pod?
[screenshot attached from clipboard]
Thinking...

The pod is in CrashLoopBackOff. The log shows a FATAL error:
database files are incompatible with server...

API Integration

The chat command sends requests to:

POST {API_SERVER_URL}/api/v1/chat

Request payload:

{
  "message": "user message text",
  "image": "data:image/png;base64,...",
  "conversation_history": [
    {"role": "user", "content": "previous question"},
    {"role": "assistant", "content": "previous answer"}
  ]
}

The Trailboss API backend handles:

• LLM inference (AWS Bedrock / Claude)
• MCP tool calling (up to 10 iterations per query)
• Tool result aggregation and response formatting

Tools Available

The assistant has access to 270+ tools across 15 MCP servers: