---
layout: blog
title: "Build Your Own AI Agent CLI in 150 Lines"
permalink: /blog/11
description: "A complete teardown of micro chat — how to build an LLM agent that discovers and orchestrates your services, with every line explained."
---

# Build Your Own AI Agent CLI in 150 Lines

<img src="/images/generated/developer-experience.png" alt="Building an AI agent CLI" style="width: 100%; border-radius: 8px; margin: 1rem 0 1.5rem;" />

*May 30, 2026 • By the Go Micro Team*

We [introduced `micro chat`](/blog/10) — a CLI that lets you talk to your microservices through an LLM. People asked how it works under the hood. The honest answer: it's about 150 lines, and there's no magic. This post walks through every piece so you can build your own — for go-micro, for your own framework, or for whatever services you have.

By the end, you'll understand the four moving parts of any tool-calling agent and have working code you can adapt.

## The Problem

You have services. They do things — create users, send emails, query orders. You want to ask for those things in plain English and have the right service called automatically.

An LLM can do the reasoning ("the user wants to send an email, so call the email service"), but it needs three things from you:

1. **A list of tools** it can call, with descriptions and parameters
2. **A way to execute** a tool when it picks one
3. **Conversation memory** so follow-up questions make sense

That's the whole problem. Let's solve each part.

## Part 1: Discover the Tools

The LLM needs to know what's available. In go-micro, every service registers its endpoints with the registry, including request types and field metadata. We turn that into a tool list:

```go
tools := ai.NewTools(reg, ai.ToolClient(client))
discovered, err := tools.Discover()
```

`discovered` is a `[]ai.Tool` — one per service endpoint. Each has a name (`users_Users_Create`), a description (from the handler's doc comment), and a parameter schema (from the request struct's fields).

If you're not using go-micro, this is the part you'd write yourself: enumerate your functions/endpoints and build a list of `{name, description, parameters}`. The registry just makes it automatic.

## Part 2: Create the Model

```go
m := ai.New("anthropic",
    ai.WithAPIKey(apiKey),
    ai.WithTools(tools),
)
```

Two things happen here. `ai.New` picks the provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, etc. — all the same interface). `ai.WithTools(tools)` wires up the **execution** side: when the model says "call `users_Users_Create` with these args," the handler routes it to the right RPC and returns the result.

That's the second piece — the way to execute. The `Tools` object does double duty: `Discover()` builds the list, and its handler executes the calls.

## Part 3: Track the Conversation

```go
hist := ai.NewHistory(50)
```

`History` is a plain message accumulator with a size limit. It's not magic — it's a `[]Message` with `Add`, `Messages`, and `Reset`. You add the user's prompt and the model's reply after each turn, and pass the accumulated messages back on the next call. That's how follow-up questions work.

## Part 4: The Loop

Now wire it together. The core of `ask` is just this:

```go
func ask(ctx context.Context, m ai.Model, hist *ai.History, tools []ai.Tool, prompt string) error {
    hist.Add("user", prompt)

    resp, err := m.Generate(ctx, &ai.Request{
        Prompt:       prompt,
        SystemPrompt: systemPrompt,
        Tools:        tools,
        Messages:     hist.Messages(),
    })
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }

    if resp.Reply != "" {
        hist.Add("assistant", resp.Reply)
        fmt.Println(resp.Reply)
    }
    for _, tc := range resp.ToolCalls {
        args, _ := json.Marshal(tc.Input)
        fmt.Printf("  → called %s(%s)\n", tc.Name, args)
    }
    if resp.Answer != "" {
        hist.Add("assistant", resp.Answer)
        fmt.Println(resp.Answer)
    }
    return nil
}
```

Read it top to bottom:

1. **Record the prompt** in history
2. **Call the model** with the prompt, the system instruction, the tool list, and the conversation so far
3. **Print the reply** and record it
4. **Show which tools were called** (the model decides, the handler executes — we just report)
5. **Print the final answer** after tools ran

The model's `Generate` does the heavy lifting: it decides whether to call tools, the handler (from step 2 of setup) executes them, and the model produces a final answer. We never wrote any "if user wants email, call email service" logic. The LLM does that reasoning from the tool descriptions.

## The REPL

Wrap `ask` in a read-loop and you have a chat:

```go
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(os.Stdin)
for {
    fmt.Print("> ")
    if !scanner.Scan() {
        return nil
    }
    line := strings.TrimSpace(scanner.Text())
    switch line {
    case "":
        continue
    case "exit", "quit":
        return nil
    case "reset":
        hist.Reset()
        continue
    default:
        if err := ask(ctx, m, hist, discovered, line); err != nil {
            fmt.Printf("error: %v\n", err)
        }
    }
}
```

That's it. Discover tools, create a model, track history, loop. Four pieces.

## Why It's So Short

The brevity comes from the framework doing the right things:

- **Services are self-describing.** Doc comments become tool descriptions. The `@example` tag gives the LLM a usage hint. You don't hand-write tool schemas.

```go
// CreateUser creates a new user account.
// @example {"name": "Alice", "email": "alice@example.com"}
func (h *Users) CreateUser(ctx context.Context, req *pb.CreateRequest, rsp *pb.CreateResponse) error {
    // ...
}
```

- **Providers are uniform.** Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, Mistral, Together, Atlas Cloud — all behind one `ai.Model` interface. Switching is one string.

- **Execution is wired automatically.** `ai.WithTools(tools)` connects tool calls to RPC dispatch. No glue.

If you stripped go-micro out and built this against raw HTTP services, you'd add maybe 50 lines: a function to enumerate your endpoints and a function to call one by name. Everything else stays the same.

## Make It Yours

The 150 lines are a starting point. Ideas for extending it:

- **Add a confirmation step** before destructive tool calls ("This will delete 3 records. Continue?")
- **Log every tool call** to an audit trail or your observability stack
- **Filter the tool list** so the agent only sees certain services
- **Swap the REPL for a Slack bot** — same `ask`, different input source
- **Pre-load a system prompt** with domain knowledge about your services
- **Trigger it from events** instead of stdin — that's exactly what [`micro flow`](/blog/9) does

The point of `micro chat` was never to be a finished product. It's a demonstration that turning services into an agent is a small, comprehensible amount of code — not a framework you have to learn, just a pattern you can copy.

## Try It, Then Read It

```bash
go install go-micro.dev/v5/cmd/micro@latest
micro run                                          # start your services
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... micro chat --provider anthropic
```

The full source is [`cmd/micro/chat/chat.go`](https://github.com/micro/go-micro/blob/master/cmd/micro/chat/chat.go) — about 220 lines including flags, help text, and provider env-var handling. The agent core is the ~40 lines you saw above.

Build your own. It's more approachable than you think.

---

*Go Micro is an open source framework for distributed systems development. [Star us on GitHub](https://github.com/micro/go-micro).*

<div class="post-nav">
  <div><a href="/blog/10">&larr; micro chat</a></div>
  <div><a href="/blog/">All Posts</a></div>
  <div><a href="/blog/12">Tools as Services &rarr;</a></div>
</div>
