Introducing /aii — Self-Serve Help for Aii CLI

The Problem

Every CLI tool has a help system. Most of them are terrible.

You type --help and get a wall of flags. You type /help and get a list of commands with one-line descriptions. You want to know how autonomous loops work or what providers are available, and the answer is: go read the docs.

We wanted something better.

Meet /aii

Starting in v0.13.7, you can ask Aii about itself — right from your session:

bash

/aii how do loops work?
/aii what providers are supported?
/aii how do I switch models?

The /aii command is a built-in skill that carries a comprehensive knowledge base about every Aii feature, command, provider, and workflow. When you ask a question, the agent reads from this knowledge base and gives you a tailored answer with examples — not a generic help page.

How It Works

Under the hood, /aii is powered by the same Skills System that drives /commit, /review-pr, and /explain. When you invoke it:

The skill's knowledge document is injected into the agent's context
Your question is passed as the argument
The agent answers using only the knowledge base — no hallucination, no web search
After the response, the skill context is cleaned up so it doesn't affect your next message

This last point is important. Earlier versions had a bug where skill instructions would leak into conversation history, causing the agent to stay in "help mode" for subsequent messages. That's fixed — each /aii invocation is self-contained.

What Can You Ask?

Anything about Aii. Here are some examples:

Features and commands

bash

/aii what slash commands are available?
/aii how do worktrees work?
/aii what's the difference between /note and /now?

Configuration

bash

/aii how do I set up Ollama?
/aii where does Aii store its config?
/aii how do I switch providers?

Workflows

bash

/aii how do I run an autonomous loop with a budget?
/aii explain the hook system
/aii how do I create a custom skill?

The knowledge base covers providers, models, tools, slash commands, keyboard shortcuts, loops, skills, souls, themes, worktrees, MCP, Telegram, sessions, and configuration.

Natural Language Detection

You don't even need the slash command. If you type something that clearly looks like a question about Aii features, the skill intent classifier can detect it and route your query automatically.

However, /aii is marked as user-initiated only — the classifier won't auto-trigger it for ambiguous queries. This prevents false positives where you're asking a general question and accidentally get a help response instead of a real answer.

Autocomplete Improvements

While building this feature, we also improved the slash command autocomplete menu:

Skill labels — Skills show a [skill] tag to distinguish them from built-in commands
Split counts — The header shows Commands (14) + Skills (4) instead of a single count
Dynamic width — The menu now uses 50% of terminal width, clamped between 60-100 characters

Try It

Update to v0.13.7:

bash

npm update -g @aiiware/aii

Then start a session and type /aii followed by any question about Aii. Or just ask naturally — the agent knows when you're asking about itself.