Ask questions across your platform

Get a cited answer drawn from your own coding sessions, your support conversations and the skills shared with you.

Prerequisites

• A signed-in CLI.

Steps

1. Ask, quoting the question:

   ❯ alis ask "how did I fix the failing deploy last week?"
   

   The answer streams to the terminal, followed by Sources: and Ask next: suggestions. Only content you can see is used; access is enforced when the sources are retrieved.

2. Follow up in the same conversation. Every run prints its conversation ID; pass it back:

   ❯ alis ask --session "<conversation-id>" "which command did that use?"
   

   Without --session, each question stands alone.

3. Open a cited source. Citations name their kind: a SKILL (load it with alis skills load <id>), a SESSION (contexts/<id>, in the TUI's Sessions page) or a SPECIALIST conversation (tickets/<id>, read it with alis specialist get).

From a script or agent

❯ alis ask "which skill helps with build environments?" --json

One AskResponse object: answerDelta (the full answer), citations[] (kind, name), relatedQuestions[] and session.

If there is no answer

Exit 1 with no_answer means nothing could be cited: rephrase as a fuller question, or search directly. When you already know you want a skill, alis skills search is faster and returns loadable ids.

In the TUI, A opens the same Ask page; 1 to 9 open a numbered source.

Related: alis ask.