How to Build a Personal AI Assistant with Claude and Bash Scripts

You don't need a fancy framework or months of development to create a useful AI assistant. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to build a practical command-line AI helper using Claude's API and simple bash scripts—something you can have running in under 30 minutes. What We're Building A terminal-based AI assistant that can: Answer questions from the command line Read and summarize files Help debug code snippets Maintain conversation context within a session Prerequisites An Anthropic API key (get one at console.anthropic.com ) curl and jq installed Basic bash knowledge Step 1: Set Up Your Environment First, store your API key securely: # Add to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY = "your-key-here" Create a project directory: mkdir -p ~/ai-assistant cd ~/ai-assistant Step 2: The Core Script Create ask.sh —your main interface to Claude: #!/bin/bash # Configuration MODEL = "claude-sonnet-4-20250514" MAX_TOKENS = 1024 # Check for API key if [ -z " $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY " ] ; t