Robert

About

Robert is designed to teach you about FreeBSD by answering questions from official manual pages and documentation. He runs entirely in your terminal and ships as a statically linked, ~3MB binary - no dependencies, no Node.js, no Electron, no browser needed.

Ask questions about FreeBSD in plain English. Robert searches man pages, documentation, the filesystem, ports, and packages, then answers with cited excerpts from official docs. He runs on DeepSeek and costs pennies to use.

The website has a full screencast and more screenshots.

Quick start

1. Download the latest release

fetch https://github.com/llmrb/robert/releases/download/v0.11.0.beta.3/robert
chmod +x robert

2. Set your DeepSeek API key

export DEEPSEEK_SECRET="sk-..."

3. Run it

./robert

Appearance

FreeBSD art - lightweight but rich console

Boot - shows a random FreeBSD tip, like ${HOME}/.profile does.

First turn - simple greeting.

Second turn - question answered from the FreeBSD man pages.

Tool confirmation - reading and searching man pages and ports is automatic. Reading files and filesystem searches require confirmation.

Tools

Robert chains these tools autonomously: it searches man pages, the filesystem, the local ports tree, and the package database; reads files, port metadata, and package metadata; and synthesises answers without hand-holding. It only pauses for confirmation when reading files or searching the filesystem.

Tool	Description	Confirmation
man-page	Returns the contents of a man page (optionally by section)	No
man-search	Searches manual pages for keywords via apropos	No
read-file	Reads a file from the filesystem	Yes
find	Searches for files and directories from a root path	Yes
grep	Searches for text across files below a root path	Yes
find-port	Searches a local ports tree for a port name	No
read-port	Reads a port's Makefile, pkg-descr, and distinfo	No
find-package	Searches the pkg(8) database for package origins	No
read-package	Reads exact package metadata from the pkg(8) database	No
version	Reports Robert's version number	No

How it works

Robert is built on mruby-llm, the mruby port of llm.rb. The architecture is designed for a single-purpose terminal app:

• Cooperative task scheduler

  The LLM call runs in a worker task while the event loop keeps the UI responsive.

• Streaming TUI

  Tokens arrive from the API and render incrementally in the chat widget, with live tool-call status.

• Roff sanitisation

  Raw man output often includes overstrike sequences (_\b/ for underlined /) or underscore-wrapped paths like _/dev_. Those are stripped before they reach the model, preventing garbled paths.

• Ports tree lookup

  Robert can search and read a local FreeBSD ports tree. It uses ${PORTSDIR} when set, otherwise /usr/ports.

• Package database lookup

  Robert can search and read package metadata from the local pkg(8) database.

• Grounded answers

  The system prompt explicitly forbids using training data. Every claim must cite a man page via blockquote. Off-topic questions are gently redirected.

The binary is a single C file (main.c) that bootstraps an mruby VM and loads the compiled irep. The Ruby application code, TUI framework, HTTP client, TLS, and LLM bindings are all linked statically. The result is a self-contained 3MB binary.

Download

Pre-built static binaries for FreeBSD 15-STABLE and 16-CURRENT can be downloaded from GitHub Releases. Each tagged release publishes a robert binary; the latest pre-release is v0.11.0.beta.3.

Build from source

Robert is an mruby gem built with the mruby-llm runtime.

git clone https://github.com/llmrb/robert.git
cd robert
make

The Makefile expects an mruby checkout at ../mruby. Override with MRUBY_DIR=/path/to/mruby if needed. Run make static for a statically linked binary (~3MB) or make for a dynamically linked one (~2MB).

Association

This project belongs to the llm.rb family of projects. mruby-llm is a port of llm.rb to mruby.

License

0BSD. See LICENSE.