sophon-cli

Named after the Sophon from Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem — a sentient proton supercomputer. This is a tiny CLI that delegates its heavy lifting to distant search APIs.

A provider-agnostic Rust CLI that queries Brave Search, Exa, or every environment-enabled provider and prints normalized text results.

Install

cargo install sophon-cli

Quick start

# Run locally from the repo
cargo run -- "rust programming"

# Choose a provider explicitly
cargo run -- "rust programming" --provider brave
cargo run -- "rust programming" --provider exa

# Query every provider enabled by environment variables
cargo run -- "rust async trait" --provider all

# Show package info
cargo run -- --about

# Run all checks
just check

Configuration

Set the API key for the provider you want to use:

# Brave
echo "BRAVE_API_KEY=your_key_here" > .env

# Exa
echo "EXA_API_KEY=your_key_here" > .env

You can also export the variables directly in your shell instead of using .env. --provider all queries every provider enabled by the current environment; for example, set both BRAVE_API_KEY and EXA_API_KEY to fan out to both providers.

Example usage

# Web search with Brave
sophon-cli "rust programming" --provider brave

# News search with Brave
sophon-cli "open source ai" --provider brave --search-type news --limit 3

# Exa search
sophon-cli "vector database benchmarks" --provider exa --limit 5

# All configured providers, with per-provider successes and failures
sophon-cli "rust async trait" --provider all

Supported providers

Real provider tokens:

• brave for web, news, images, and video search
• exa for Exa search results mapped into the shared domain model

all is a CLI-only selection mode. It queries every configured real provider in catalog order and prints per-provider failures when one provider rejects or fails a request.

Maintainers add or change provider identity, display names, environment variable names, stable ordering, and production wiring in src/bootstrap/provider_catalog.rs.

Docs

See the architecture docs for the typed input-to-output flow and layer boundaries.

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