ShellSage is an AI-powered terminal assistant built by Answer.AI that integrates with tmux to provide context-aware help for shell commands and sysadmin tasks. By leveraging tmux's capture-pane functionality, it can see your terminal history, current state, and errors — eliminating the need to context-switch between documentation, Stack Overflow, and your terminal. Unlike generic AI assistants, ShellSage focuses on teaching rather than just providing commands, explaining flags, gotchas, and best practices based on your actual terminal context. It's installable via pip, requires an Anthropic API key, and works best inside a tmux session. A real-world example shows how it helped diagnose server probing via Certificate Transparency logs. The tool is open source and under active development.
