llm - Man Page

Install this tool using pip:

pip install llm

Or using pipx:

pipx install llm

Or using uv (more tips below):

uv tool install llm

Or using Homebrew (see warning note):

brew install llm

If you installed using pip:

pip install -U llm

For pipx:

pipx upgrade llm

For uv:

uv tool upgrade llm

For Homebrew:

brew upgrade llm

If the latest version is not yet available on Homebrew you can upgrade like this instead:

llm install -U llm

If you have uv installed you can also use the uvx command to try LLM without first installing it like this:

export OPENAI_API_KEY='sx-...'
uvx llm 'fun facts about skunks'

This will install and run LLM using a temporary virtual environment.

You can use the --with option to add extra plugins. To use Anthropic's models, for example:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY='...'
uvx --with llm-anthropic llm -m claude-3.5-haiku 'fun facts about skunks'

All of the usual LLM commands will work with uvx llm. Here's how to set your OpenAI key without needing an environment variable for example:

uvx llm keys set openai
# Paste key here

The version of LLM packaged for Homebrew currently uses Python 3.12. The PyTorch project do not yet have a stable release of PyTorch for that version of Python.

This means that LLM plugins that depend on PyTorch such as llm-sentence-transformers may not install cleanly with the Homebrew version of LLM.

You can workaround this by manually installing PyTorch before installing llm-sentence-transformers:

llm install llm-python
llm python -m pip install \
  --pre torch torchvision \
  --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/nightly/cpu
llm install llm-sentence-transformers

This should produce a working installation of that plugin.

Plugins can be used to add support for other language models, including models that can run on your own device.

For example, the llm-gpt4all plugin adds support for 17 new models that can be installed on your own machine. You can install that like so:

llm install llm-gpt4all

Many LLM models require an API key. These API keys can be provided to this tool using several different mechanisms.

You can obtain an API key for OpenAI's language models from the API keys page on their site.

The easiest way to store an API key is to use the llm keys set command:

llm keys set openai

You will be prompted to enter the key like this:

% llm keys set openai
Enter key:

Once stored, this key will be automatically used for subsequent calls to the API:

llm "Five ludicrous names for a pet lobster"

You can list the names of keys that have been set using this command:

llm keys

Keys that are stored in this way live in a file called keys.json. This file is located at the path shown when you run the following command:

llm keys path

On macOS this will be ~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/keys.json. On Linux it may be something like ~/.config/io.datasette.llm/keys.json.

Keys can be passed directly using the --key option, like this:

llm "Five names for pet weasels" --key sk-my-key-goes-here

You can also pass the alias of a key stored in the keys.json file. For example, if you want to maintain a personal API key you could add that like this:

llm keys set personal

And then use it for prompts like so:

llm "Five friendly names for a pet skunk" --key personal

Keys can also be set using an environment variable. These are different for different models.

For OpenAI models the key will be read from the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable.

The environment variable will be used if no --key option is passed to the command and there is not a key configured in keys.json

To use an environment variable in place of the keys.json key run the prompt like this:

llm 'my prompt' --key $OPENAI_API_KEY

You can configure LLM in a number of different ways.

The model used when calling llm without the -m/--model option defaults to gpt-4o-mini - the fastest and least expensive OpenAI model.

You can use the llm models default command to set a different default model. For GPT-4o (slower and more expensive, but more capable) run this:

llm models default gpt-4o

You can view the current model by running this:

llm models default

Any of the supported aliases for a model can be passed to this command.

This tool stores various files - prompt templates, stored keys, preferences, a database of logs - in a directory on your computer.

On macOS this is ~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/.

On Linux it may be something like ~/.config/io.datasette.llm/.

You can set a custom location for this directory by setting the LLM_USER_PATH environment variable:

export LLM_USER_PATH=/path/to/my/custom/directory

By default, LLM will log every prompt and response you make to a SQLite database - see Logging to SQLite for more details.

You can turn this behavior off by default by running:

llm logs off

Or turn it back on again with:

llm logs on

Run llm logs status to see the current states of the setting.

The command to run a prompt is llm prompt 'your prompt'. This is the default command, so you can use llm 'your prompt' as a shortcut.

These examples use the default OpenAI gpt-4o-mini model, which requires you to first set an OpenAI API key.

You can install LLM plugins to use models from other providers, including openly licensed models you can run directly on your own computer.

To run a prompt, streaming tokens as they come in:

llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes'

To disable streaming and only return the response once it has completed:

llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes' --no-stream

To switch from ChatGPT 4o-mini (the default) to GPT-4o:

llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes' -m gpt-4o

You can use -m 4o as an even shorter shortcut.

Pass --model <model name> to use a different model. Run llm models to see a list of available models.

Or if you know the name is too long to type, use -q once or more to provide search terms - the model with the shortest model ID that matches all of those terms (as a lowercase substring) will be used:

llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes' -q 4o -q mini

To change the default model for the current session, set the LLM_MODEL environment variable:

export LLM_MODEL=gpt-4.1-mini
llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes' # Uses gpt-4.1-mini

You can send a prompt directly to standard input like this:

echo 'Ten names for cheesecakes' | llm

If you send text to standard input and provide arguments, the resulting prompt will consist of the piped content followed by the arguments:

cat myscript.py | llm 'explain this code'

Will run a prompt of:

<contents of myscript.py> explain this code

For models that support them, system prompts are a better tool for this kind of prompting.

Some models support options. You can pass these using -o/--option name value - for example, to set the temperature to 1.5 run this:

llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes' -o temperature 1.5

Use the llm models --options command to see which options are supported by each model.

You can also configure default options for a model using the llm models options commands.

Some models are multi-modal, which means they can accept input in more than just text. GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini can accept images, and models such as Google Gemini 1.5 can accept audio and video as well.

LLM calls these attachments. You can pass attachments using the -a option like this:

llm "describe this image" -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg

Attachments can be passed using URLs or file paths, and you can attach more than one attachment to a single prompt:

llm "extract text" -a image1.jpg -a image2.jpg

You can also pipe an attachment to LLM by using - as the filename:

cat image.jpg | llm "describe this image" -a -

LLM will attempt to automatically detect the content type of the image. If this doesn't work you can instead use the --attachment-type option (--at for short) which takes the URL/path plus an explicit content type:

cat myfile | llm "describe this image" --at - image/jpeg

You can use -s/--system '...' to set a system prompt.

llm 'SQL to calculate total sales by month' \
  --system 'You are an exaggerated sentient cheesecake that knows SQL and talks about cheesecake a lot'

This is useful for piping content to standard input, for example:

curl -s 'https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/15/per-interpreter-gils/' | \
  llm -s 'Suggest topics for this post as a JSON array'

Or to generate a description of changes made to a Git repository since the last commit:

git diff | llm -s 'Describe these changes'

Different models support system prompts in different ways.

The OpenAI models are particularly good at using system prompts as instructions for how they should process additional input sent as part of the regular prompt.

Other models might use system prompts change the default voice and attitude of the model.

System prompts can be saved as templates to create reusable tools. For example, you can create a template called pytest like this:

llm -s 'write pytest tests for this code' --save pytest

And then use the new template like this:

cat llm/utils.py | llm -t pytest

See prompt templates for more.

Many models support the ability to call external tools. Tools can be provided by plugins or you can pass a --functions CODE option to LLM to define one or more Python functions that the model can then call.

llm --functions '
def multiply(x: int, y: int) -> int:
    """Multiply two numbers."""
    return x * y
' 'what is 34234 * 213345'

Add --td/--tools-debug to see full details of the tools that are being executed. You can also set the LLM_TOOLS_DEBUG environment variable to 1 to enable this for all prompts.

llm --functions '
def multiply(x: int, y: int) -> int:
    """Multiply two numbers."""
    return x * y
' 'what is 34234 * 213345' --td

Output:

Tool call: multiply({'x': 34234, 'y': 213345})
  7303652730
34234 multiplied by 213345 is 7,303,652,730.

Or add --ta/--tools-approve to approve each tool call interactively before it is executed:

llm --functions '
def multiply(x: int, y: int) -> int:
    """Multiply two numbers."""
    return x * y
' 'what is 34234 * 213345' --ta

Output:

Tool call: multiply({'x': 34234, 'y': 213345})
Approve tool call? [y/N]:

The --functions option can be passed more than once, and can also point to the filename of a .py file containing one or more functions.

If you have any tools that have been made available via plugins you can add them to the prompt using --tool/-T option. For example, using llm-tools-simpleeval like this:

llm install llm-tools-simpleeval
llm --tool simple_eval "4444 * 233423" --td

Run this command to see a list of available tools from plugins:

llm tools

If you run a prompt that uses tools from plugins (as opposed to tools provided using the --functions option) continuing that conversation using llm -c will reuse the tools from the first prompt. Running llm chat -c will start a chat that continues using those same tools. For example:

llm -T simple_eval "12345 * 12345" --td
Tool call: simple_eval({'expression': '12345 * 12345'})
  152399025
12345 multiplied by 12345 equals 152,399,025.
llm -c "that * 6" --td
Tool call: simple_eval({'expression': '152399025 * 6'})
  914394150
152,399,025 multiplied by 6 equals 914,394,150.
llm chat -c --td
Chatting with gpt-4.1-mini
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt
> / 123
Tool call: simple_eval({'expression': '914394150 / 123'})
  7434098.780487805
914,394,150 divided by 123 is approximately 7,434,098.78.

Some tools are bundled in a configurable collection of tools called a toolbox. This means a single --tool option can load multiple related tools.

llm-tools-datasette is one example. Using a toolbox looks like this:

llm install llm-tools-datasette
llm -T 'Datasette("https://datasette.io/content")' "Show tables" --td

Toolboxes always start with a capital letter. They can be configured by passing a tool specification, which should fit the following patterns:

• Empty: ToolboxName or ToolboxName() - has no configuration arguments
• JSON object: ToolboxName({"key": "value", "other": 42})
• Single JSON value: ToolboxName("hello") or ToolboxName([1,2,3])
• Key-value pairs: ToolboxName(name="test", count=5, items=[1,2]) - treated the same as {"name": "test", "count": 5, "items": [1, 2]}, all values must be valid JSON

Toolboxes are not currently supported with the llm -c option, but they work well with llm chat. Try chatting with the Datasette content database like this:

llm chat -T 'Datasette("https://datasette.io/content")' --td

Chatting with gpt-4.1-mini
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
...
> show tables

If you are using an LLM to generate code it can be useful to retrieve just the code it produces without any of the surrounding explanatory text.

The -x/--extract option will scan the response for the first instance of a Markdown fenced code block - something that looks like this:

```python
def my_function():
    # ...
```

It will extract and returns just the content of that block, excluding the fenced coded delimiters. If there are no fenced code blocks it will return the full response.

Use --xl/--extract-last to return the last fenced code block instead of the first.

The entire response including explanatory text is still logged to the database, and can be viewed using llm logs -c.

Some models include the ability to return JSON that matches a provided JSON schema. Models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini all include this capability.

Take a look at the schemas documentation for a detailed guide to using this feature.

You can pass JSON schemas directly to the --schema option:

llm --schema '{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "dogs": {
      "type": "array",
      "items": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
          "name": {
            "type": "string"
          },
          "bio": {
            "type": "string"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}' -m gpt-4o-mini 'invent two dogs'

Or use LLM's custom concise schema syntax like this:

llm --schema 'name,bio' 'invent a dog'

Two use the same concise schema for multiple items use --schema-multi:

llm --schema-multi 'name,bio' 'invent two dogs'

You can also save the JSON schema to a file and reference the filename using --schema:

llm --schema dogs.schema.json 'invent two dogs'

Or save your schema to a template like this:

llm --schema dogs.schema.json --save dogs
# Then to use it:
llm -t dogs 'invent two dogs'

Be warned that different models may support different dialects of the JSON schema specification.

See Browsing logged JSON objects created using schemas for tips on using the llm logs --schema X command to access JSON objects you have previously logged using this option.

You can use the -f/--fragment option to reference fragments of context that you would like to load into your prompt. Fragments can be specified as URLs, file paths or as aliases to previously saved fragments.

Fragments are designed for running longer prompts. LLM stores prompts in a database, and the same prompt repeated many times can end up stored as multiple copies, wasting disk space. A fragment will be stored just once and referenced by all of the prompts that use it.

The -f option can accept a path to a file on disk, a URL or the hash or alias of a previous fragment.

For example, to ask a question about the robots.txt file on llm.datasette.io:

llm -f https://llm.datasette.io/robots.txt 'explain this'

For a poem inspired by some Python code on disk:

llm -f cli.py 'a short snappy poem inspired by this code'

You can use as many -f options as you like - the fragments will be concatenated together in the order you provided, with any additional prompt added at the end.

Fragments can also be used for the system prompt using the --sf/--system-fragment option. If you have a file called explain_code.txt containing this:

Explain this code in detail. Include copies of the code quoted in the explanation.

You can run it as the system prompt like this:

llm -f cli.py --sf explain_code.txt

You can use the llm fragments set command to load a fragment and give it an alias for use in future queries:

llm fragments set cli cli.py
# Then
llm -f cli 'explain this code'

Use llm fragments to list all fragments that have been stored:

llm fragments

You can search by passing one or more -q X search strings. This will return results matching all of those strings, across the source, hash, aliases and content:

llm fragments -q pytest -q asyncio

The llm fragments remove command removes an alias. It does not delete the fragment record itself as those are linked to previous prompts and responses and cannot be deleted independently of them.

llm fragments remove cli

By default, the tool will start a new conversation each time you run it.

You can opt to continue the previous conversation by passing the -c/--continue option:

llm 'More names' -c

This will re-send the prompts and responses for the previous conversation as part of the call to the language model. Note that this can add up quickly in terms of tokens, especially if you are using expensive models.

--continue will automatically use the same model as the conversation that you are continuing, even if you omit the -m/--model option.

To continue a conversation that is not the most recent one, use the --cid/--conversation <id> option:

llm 'More names' --cid 01h53zma5txeby33t1kbe3xk8q

You can find these conversation IDs using the llm logs command.

To learn more about your computer's operating system based on the output of uname -a, run this:

llm "Tell me about my operating system: $(uname -a)"

This pattern of using $(command) inside a double quoted string is a useful way to quickly assemble prompts.

Some models are completion models - rather than being tuned to respond to chat style prompts, they are designed to complete a sentence or paragraph.

An example of this is the gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct OpenAI model.

You can prompt that model the same way as the chat models, but be aware that the prompt format that works best is likely to differ.

llm -m gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct 'Reasons to tame a wild beaver:'

The llm chat command starts an ongoing interactive chat with a model.

This is particularly useful for models that run on your own machine, since it saves them from having to be loaded into memory each time a new prompt is added to a conversation.

Run llm chat, optionally with a -m model_id, to start a chat conversation:

llm chat -m chatgpt

Each chat starts a new conversation. A record of each conversation can be accessed through the logs.

You can pass -c to start a conversation as a continuation of your most recent prompt. This will automatically use the most recently used model:

llm chat -c

For models that support them, you can pass options using -o/--option:

llm chat -m gpt-4 -o temperature 0.5

You can pass a system prompt to be used for your chat conversation:

llm chat -m gpt-4 -s 'You are a sentient cheesecake'

You can also pass a template - useful for creating chat personas that you wish to return to.

Here's how to create a template for your GPT-4 powered cheesecake:

llm --system 'You are a sentient cheesecake' -m gpt-4 --save cheesecake

Now you can start a new chat with your cheesecake any time you like using this:

llm chat -t cheesecake

Chatting with gpt-4
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt
Type '!fragment <my_fragment> [<another_fragment> ...]' to insert one or more fragments
> who are you?
I am a sentient cheesecake, meaning I am an artificial
intelligence embodied in a dessert form, specifically a
cheesecake. However, I don't consume or prepare foods
like humans do, I communicate, learn and help answer
your queries.

Type quit or exit followed by <enter> to end a chat session.

Sometimes you may want to paste multiple lines of text into a chat at once - for example when debugging an error message.

To do that, type !multi to start a multi-line input. Type or paste your text, then type !end and hit <enter> to finish.

If your pasted text might itself contain a !end line, you can set a custom delimiter using !multi abc followed by !end abc at the end:

Chatting with gpt-4
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt.
Type '!fragment <my_fragment> [<another_fragment> ...]' to insert one or more fragments
> !multi custom-end
 Explain this error:

   File "/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniconda/base/lib/python3.10/urllib/request.py", line 1391, in https_open
    return self.do_open(http.client.HTTPSConnection, req,
  File "/opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniconda/base/lib/python3.10/urllib/request.py", line 1351, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
urllib.error.URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 8] nodename nor servname provided, or not known>

 !end custom-end

You can also use !edit to open your default editor and modify the prompt before sending it to the model.

Chatting with gpt-4
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt.
Type '!fragment <my_fragment> [<another_fragment> ...]' to insert one or more fragments
> !edit

llm chat takes the same --tool/-T and --functions options as llm prompt. You can use this to start a chat with the specified tools enabled.

The llm models command lists every model that can be used with LLM, along with their aliases. This includes models that have been installed using plugins.

llm models

Example output:

OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o (aliases: 4o)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini (aliases: 4o-mini)
OpenAI Chat: o1-preview
OpenAI Chat: o1-mini
GeminiPro: gemini-1.5-pro-002
GeminiPro: gemini-1.5-flash-002
...

Add one or more -q term options to search for models matching all of those search terms:

llm models -q gpt-4o
llm models -q 4o -q mini

Use one or more -m options to indicate specific models, either by their model ID or one of their aliases:

llm models -m gpt-4o -m gemini-1.5-pro-002

Add --options to also see documentation for the options supported by each model:

llm models --options

Output:

OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o (aliases: 4o)
  Options:
    temperature: float
      What sampling temperature to use, between 0 and 2. Higher values like
      0.8 will make the output more random, while lower values like 0.2 will
      make it more focused and deterministic.
    max_tokens: int
      Maximum number of tokens to generate.
    top_p: float
      An alternative to sampling with temperature, called nucleus sampling,
      where the model considers the results of the tokens with top_p
      probability mass. So 0.1 means only the tokens comprising the top 10%
      probability mass are considered. Recommended to use top_p or
      temperature but not both.
    frequency_penalty: float
      Number between -2.0 and 2.0. Positive values penalize new tokens based
      on their existing frequency in the text so far, decreasing the model's
      likelihood to repeat the same line verbatim.
    presence_penalty: float
      Number between -2.0 and 2.0. Positive values penalize new tokens based
      on whether they appear in the text so far, increasing the model's
      likelihood to talk about new topics.
    stop: str
      A string where the API will stop generating further tokens.
    logit_bias: dict, str
      Modify the likelihood of specified tokens appearing in the completion.
      Pass a JSON string like '{"1712":-100, "892":-100, "1489":-100}'
    seed: int
      Integer seed to attempt to sample deterministically
    json_object: boolean
      Output a valid JSON object {...}. Prompt must mention JSON.
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: chatgpt-4o-latest (aliases: chatgpt-4o)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini (aliases: 4o-mini)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-audio-preview
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    audio/mpeg, audio/wav
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-audio-preview-2024-12-17
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    audio/mpeg, audio/wav
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-audio-preview-2024-10-01
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    audio/mpeg, audio/wav
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    audio/mpeg, audio/wav
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview-2024-12-17
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    audio/mpeg, audio/wav
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.1 (aliases: 4.1)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.1-mini (aliases: 4.1-mini)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.1-nano (aliases: 4.1-nano)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo (aliases: 3.5, chatgpt)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo-16k (aliases: chatgpt-16k, 3.5-16k)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4 (aliases: 4, gpt4)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-32k (aliases: 4-32k)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-1106-preview
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-0125-preview
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-turbo (aliases: gpt-4-turbo-preview, 4-turbo, 4t)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.5-preview-2025-02-27
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.5-preview (aliases: gpt-4.5)
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o1
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o1-2024-12-17
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o1-preview
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o1-mini
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
  Features:
  - streaming
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o3-mini
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o3
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: o4-mini
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-mini
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-nano
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-2025-08-07
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-nano-2025-08-07
  Options:
    temperature: float
    max_tokens: int
    top_p: float
    frequency_penalty: float
    presence_penalty: float
    stop: str
    logit_bias: dict, str
    seed: int
    json_object: boolean
    reasoning_effort: str
  Attachment types:
    application/pdf, image/gif, image/jpeg, image/png, image/webp
  Features:
  - streaming
  - schemas
  - tools
  - async
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY
OpenAI Completion: gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct (aliases: 3.5-instruct, chatgpt-instruct)
  Options:
    temperature: float
      What sampling temperature to use, between 0 and 2. Higher values like
      0.8 will make the output more random, while lower values like 0.2 will
      make it more focused and deterministic.
    max_tokens: int
      Maximum number of tokens to generate.
    top_p: float
      An alternative to sampling with temperature, called nucleus sampling,
      where the model considers the results of the tokens with top_p
      probability mass. So 0.1 means only the tokens comprising the top 10%
      probability mass are considered. Recommended to use top_p or
      temperature but not both.
    frequency_penalty: float
      Number between -2.0 and 2.0. Positive values penalize new tokens based
      on their existing frequency in the text so far, decreasing the model's
      likelihood to repeat the same line verbatim.
    presence_penalty: float
      Number between -2.0 and 2.0. Positive values penalize new tokens based
      on whether they appear in the text so far, increasing the model's
      likelihood to talk about new topics.
    stop: str
      A string where the API will stop generating further tokens.
    logit_bias: dict, str
      Modify the likelihood of specified tokens appearing in the completion.
      Pass a JSON string like '{"1712":-100, "892":-100, "1489":-100}'
    seed: int
      Integer seed to attempt to sample deterministically
    logprobs: int
      Include the log probabilities of most likely N per token
  Features:
  - streaming
  Keys:
    key: openai
    env_var: OPENAI_API_KEY

When running a prompt you can pass the full model name or any of the aliases to the -m/--model option:

llm -m 4o \
  'As many names for cheesecakes as you can think of, with detailed descriptions'

To configure a default option for a specific model, use the llm models options set command:

llm models options set gpt-4o temperature 0.5

This option will then be applied automatically any time you run a prompt through the gpt-4o model.

Default options are stored in the model_options.json file in the LLM configuration directory.

You can list all default options across all models using the llm models options list command:

llm models options list

Or show them for an individual model with llm models options show <model_id>:

llm models options show gpt-4o

To clear a default option, use the llm models options clear command:

llm models options clear gpt-4o temperature

Or clear all default options for a model like this:

llm models options clear gpt-4o

Default model options are respected by both the llm prompt and the llm chat commands. They will not be applied when you use LLM as a Python library.

LLM ships with a default plugin for talking to OpenAI's API. OpenAI offer both language models and embedding models, and LLM can access both types.

All OpenAI models are accessed using an API key. You can obtain one from the API keys page on their site.

Once you have created a key, configure LLM to use it by running:

llm keys set openai

Then paste in the API key.

Run llm models for a full list of available models. The OpenAI models supported by LLM are:

OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o (aliases: 4o)
OpenAI Chat: chatgpt-4o-latest (aliases: chatgpt-4o)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini (aliases: 4o-mini)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-audio-preview
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-audio-preview-2024-12-17
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-audio-preview-2024-10-01
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview-2024-12-17
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.1 (aliases: 4.1)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.1-mini (aliases: 4.1-mini)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.1-nano (aliases: 4.1-nano)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo (aliases: 3.5, chatgpt)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo-16k (aliases: chatgpt-16k, 3.5-16k)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4 (aliases: 4, gpt4)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-32k (aliases: 4-32k)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-1106-preview
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-0125-preview
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-turbo (aliases: gpt-4-turbo-preview, 4-turbo, 4t)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.5-preview-2025-02-27
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4.5-preview (aliases: gpt-4.5)
OpenAI Chat: o1
OpenAI Chat: o1-2024-12-17
OpenAI Chat: o1-preview
OpenAI Chat: o1-mini
OpenAI Chat: o3-mini
OpenAI Chat: o3
OpenAI Chat: o4-mini
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-mini
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-nano
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-2025-08-07
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-mini-2025-08-07
OpenAI Chat: gpt-5-nano-2025-08-07
OpenAI Completion: gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct (aliases: 3.5-instruct, chatgpt-instruct)

See the OpenAI models documentation for details of each of these.

gpt-4o-mini (aliased to 4o-mini) is the least expensive model, and is the default for if you don't specify a model at all. Consult OpenAI's model documentation for details of the other models.

o1-pro is not available  through the Chat Completions API used by LLM's default OpenAI plugin. You can install the new llm-openai-plugin plugin to access that model.

The following features work with OpenAI models:

• System prompts can be used to provide instructions that have a higher weight than the prompt itself.
• Attachments. Many OpenAI models support image inputs - check which ones using llm models --options. Any model that accepts images can also accept PDFs.
• Schemas can be used to influence the JSON structure of the model output.
• Model options can be used to set parameters like temperature. Use llm models --options for a full list of supported options.

Run llm embed-models for a list of embedding models. The following OpenAI embedding models are supported by LLM:

ada-002 (aliases: ada, oai)
3-small
3-large
3-small-512
3-large-256
3-large-1024

The 3-small model is currently the most inexpensive. 3-large costs more but is more capable - see New embedding models and API updates on the OpenAI blog for details and benchmarks.

An important characteristic of any embedding model is the size of the vector it returns. Smaller vectors cost less to store and query, but may be less accurate.

OpenAI 3-small and 3-large vectors can be safely truncated to lower dimensions without losing too much accuracy. The -int models provided by LLM are pre-configured to do this, so 3-large-256 is the 3-large model truncated to 256 dimensions.

The vector size of the supported OpenAI embedding models are as follows:

The gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct model is a little different - it is a completion model rather than a chat model, described in the OpenAI completions documentation.

Completion models can be called with the -o logprobs 3 option (not supported by chat models) which will cause LLM to store 3 log probabilities for each returned token in the SQLite database. Consult this issue for details on how to read these values.

OpenAI occasionally release new models with new names. LLM aims to ship new releases to support these, but you can also configure them directly, by adding them to a extra-openai-models.yaml configuration file.

Run this command to find the directory in which this file should be created:

dirname "$(llm logs path)"

On my Mac laptop I get this:

~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm

Create a file in that directory called extra-openai-models.yaml.

Let's say OpenAI have just released the gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 model and you want to use it, despite LLM not yet shipping support. You could configure that by adding this to the file:

- model_id: gpt-3.5-turbo-0613
  model_name: gpt-3.5-turbo-0613
  aliases: ["0613"]

The model_id is the identifier that will be recorded in the LLM logs. You can use this to specify the model, or you can optionally include a list of aliases for that model. The model_name is the actual model identifier that will be passed to the API, which must match exactly what the API expects.

If the model is a completion model (such as gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct) add completion: true to the configuration.

If the model supports structured extraction using json_schema, add supports_schema: true to the configuration.

For reasoning models like o1 or o3-mini add reasoning: true.

With this configuration in place, the following command should run a prompt against the new model:

llm -m 0613 'What is the capital of France?'

Run llm models to confirm that the new model is now available:

llm models

Example output:

OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo (aliases: 3.5, chatgpt)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo-16k (aliases: chatgpt-16k, 3.5-16k)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4 (aliases: 4, gpt4)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-4-32k (aliases: 4-32k)
OpenAI Chat: gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 (aliases: 0613)

Running llm logs -n 1 should confirm that the prompt and response has been correctly logged to the database.

LLM supports OpenAI models by default. You can install plugins to add support for other models. You can also add additional OpenAI-API-compatible models using a configuration file.

LLM plugins can provide local models that run on your machine.

To install llm-gpt4all, providing 17 models from the GPT4All project, run this:

llm install llm-gpt4all

Run llm models to see the expanded list of available models.

To run a prompt through one of the models from GPT4All specify it using -m/--model:

llm -m orca-mini-3b-gguf2-q4_0 'What is the capital of France?'

The model will be downloaded and cached the first time you use it.

Check the plugin directory for the latest list of available plugins for other models.

Projects such as LocalAI offer a REST API that imitates the OpenAI API but can be used to run other models, including models that can be installed on your own machine. These can be added using the same configuration mechanism.

The model_id is the name LLM will use for the model. The model_name is the name which needs to be passed to the API - this might differ from the model_id, especially if the model_id could potentially clash with other installed models.

The api_base key can be used to point the OpenAI client library at a different API endpoint.

To add the orca-mini-3b model hosted by a local installation of LocalAI, add this to your extra-openai-models.yaml file:

- model_id: orca-openai-compat
  model_name: orca-mini-3b.ggmlv3
  api_base: "http://localhost:8080"

If the api_base is set, the existing configured openai API key will not be sent by default.

You can set api_key_name to the name of a key stored using the API key management feature.

Other keys you can use here:

• completion: true for completion models that should use the /completion endpoint as opposed to /completion/chat
• supports_tools: true for models that support tool calling
• can_stream: false to disable streaming mode for models that cannot stream
• supports_schema: true for models that support JSON structured schema output
• vision: true for models that can accept images as input
• audio: true for models that accept audio attachments

Having configured the model like this, run llm models --options -m MODEL_ID to check that it installed correctly. You can then run prompts against it like so:

llm -m orca-openai-compat 'What is the capital of France?'

And confirm they were logged correctly with:

llm logs -n 1

Some providers such as openrouter.ai may require the setting of additional HTTP headers. You can set those using the headers: key like this:

- model_id: claude
  model_name: anthropic/claude-2
  api_base: "https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"
  api_key_name: openrouter
  headers:
    HTTP-Referer: "https://llm.datasette.io/"
    X-Title: LLM

Many Large Language Models have been trained to execute tools as part of responding to a prompt. LLM supports tool usage with both the command-line interface and the Python API.

Exposing tools to LLMs carries risks! Be sure to read the warning below.

A tool is effectively a function that the model can request to be executed. Here's how that works:

1. The initial prompt to the model includes a list of available tools, containing their names, descriptions and parameters.
2. The model can choose to call one (or sometimes more than one) of those tools, returning a request for the tool to execute.
3. The code that calls the model - in this case LLM itself - then executes the specified tool with the provided arguments.
4. LLM prompts the model a second time, this time including the output of the tool execution.
5. The model can then use that output to generate its next response.

This sequence can run several times in a loop, allowing the LLM to access data, act on that data and then pass that data off to other tools for further processing.

Tools can be dangerous

Warning: Tools can be dangerous

Applications built on top of LLMs suffer from a class of attacks called prompt injection attacks. These occur when a malicious third party injects content into the LLM which causes it to take tool-based actions that act against the interests of the user of that application.

Be very careful about which tools you enable when you potentially might be exposed to untrusted sources of content - web pages, GitHub issues posted by other people, email and messages that have been sent to you that could come from an attacker.

Watch out for the lethal trifecta of prompt injection exfiltration attacks. If your tool-enabled LLM has the following:

• access to private data
• exposure to malicious instructions
• the ability to exfiltrate information

Anyone who can feed malicious instructions into your LLM - by leaving them on a web page it visits, or sending an email to an inbox that it monitors - could be able to trick your LLM into using other tools to access your private information and then exfiltrate (pass out) that data to somewhere the attacker can see it.

LLM comes with a default tool installed, called llm_version. You can try that out like this:

llm --tool llm_version "What version of LLM is this?" --td

You can also use -T llm_version as a shortcut for --tool llm_version.

The output should look like this:

Tool call: llm_version({})
  0.26a0

The installed version of the LLM is 0.26a0.

Further tools can be installed using plugins, or you can use the llm --functions option to pass tools implemented as PYthon functions directly, as described here.

In LLM every tool is a defined as a Python function. The function can take any number of arguments and can return a string or an object that can be converted to a string.

Tool functions should include a docstring that describes what the function does. This docstring will become the description that is passed to the model.

Tools can also be defined as toolbox classes, a subclass of llm.Toolbox that allows multiple related tools to be bundled together. Toolbox classes can be be configured when they are instantiated, and can also maintain state in between multiple tool calls.

The Python API can accept functions directly. The command-line interface has two ways for tools to be defined: via plugins that implement the register_tools() plugin hook, or directly on the command-line using the --functions argument to specify a block of Python code defining one or more functions - or a path to a Python file containing the same.

You can use tools with the LLM command-line tool or with the Python API.

LLM includes some default tools for you to try out:

• llm_version() returns the current version of LLM
• llm_time() returns the current local and UTC time

Try them like this:

llm -T llm_version -T llm_time 'Give me the current time and LLM version' --td

Consult the register_tools() plugin hook documentation for examples of how to implement tools in plugins.

If your plugin needs access to API secrets I recommend storing those using llm keys set api-name and then reading them using the llm.get_key() utility function. This avoids secrets being logged to the database as part of tool calls.

Large Language Models are very good at producing structured output as JSON or other formats. LLM's schemas feature allows you to define the exact structure of JSON data you want to receive from a model.

This feature is supported by models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and can be implemented for others via plugins.

This page describes schemas used via the llm command-line tool. Schemas can also be used from the Python API.

In this tutorial we're going to use schemas to analyze some news stories.

But first, let's invent some dogs!

LLMs are great at creating test data. Let's define a simple schema for a dog, using LLM's concise schema syntax. We'll pass that to LLm with llm --schema and prompt it to "invent a cool dog":

llm --schema 'name, age int, one_sentence_bio' 'invent a cool dog'

I got back Ziggy:

{
  "name": "Ziggy",
  "age": 4,
  "one_sentence_bio": "Ziggy is a hyper-intelligent, bioluminescent dog who loves to perform tricks in the dark and guides his owner home using his glowing fur."
}

The response matched my schema, with name and one_sentence_bio string columns and an integer for age.

We're using the default LLM model here - gpt-4o-mini. Add -m model to use another model - for example use -m o3-mini to have O3 mini invent some dogs.

For a list of available models that support schemas, run this command:

llm models --schemas

Want several more dogs? You can pass in that same schema using --schema-multi and ask for several at once:

llm --schema-multi 'name, age int, one_sentence_bio' 'invent 3 really cool dogs'

Here's what I got:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "Echo",
      "age": 3,
      "one_sentence_bio": "Echo is a sleek, silvery-blue Siberian Husky with mesmerizing blue eyes and a talent for mimicking sounds, making him a natural entertainer."
    },
    {
      "name": "Nova",
      "age": 2,
      "one_sentence_bio": "Nova is a vibrant, spotted Dalmatian with an adventurous spirit and a knack for agility courses, always ready to leap into action."
    },
    {
      "name": "Pixel",
      "age": 4,
      "one_sentence_bio": "Pixel is a playful, tech-savvy Poodle with a rainbow-colored coat, known for her ability to interact with smart devices and her love for puzzle toys."
    }
  ]
}

So that's the basic idea: we can feed in a schema and LLM will pass it to the underlying model and (usually) get back JSON that conforms to that schema.

This stuff gets a lot more useful when you start applying it to larger amounts of text, extracting structured details from unstructured content.

We are going to extract details of the people who are mentioned in different news stories, and then use those to compile a database.

Let's start by compiling a schema. For each person mentioned we want to extract the following details:

• Their name
• The organization they work for
• Their role
• What we learned about them from the story

We will also record the article headline and the publication date, to make things easier for us later on.

Using LLM's custom, concise schema language, this time with newlines separating the individual fields (for the dogs example we used commas):

name: the person's name
organization: who they represent
role: their job title or role
learned: what we learned about them from this story
article_headline: the headline of the story
article_date: the publication date in YYYY-MM-DD

As you can see, this schema definition is pretty simple - each line has the name of a property we want to capture, then an optional: followed by a description, which doubles as instructions for the model.

The full syntax is described below - you can also include type information for things like numbers.

Let's run this against a news article.

Visit AP News and grab the URL to an article. I'm using this one:

https://apnews.com/article/trump-federal-employees-firings-a85d1aaf1088e050d39dcf7e3664bb9f

There's quite a lot of HTML on that page, possibly even enough to exceed GPT-4o mini's 128,000 token input limit. We'll use another tool called strip-tags to reduce that. If you have uv installed you can call it using uvx strip-tags, otherwise you'll need to install it first:

uv tool install strip-tags
# Or "pip install" or "pipx install"

Now we can run this command to extract the people from that article:

curl 'https://apnews.com/article/trump-federal-employees-firings-a85d1aaf1088e050d39dcf7e3664bb9f' | \
  uvx strip-tags | \
  llm --schema-multi "
name: the person's name
organization: who they represent
role: their job title or role
learned: what we learned about them from this story
article_headline: the headline of the story
article_date: the publication date in YYYY-MM-DD
" --system 'extract people mentioned in this article'

The output I got started like this:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "William Alsup",
      "organization": "U.S. District Court",
      "role": "Judge",
      "learned": "He ruled that the mass firings of probationary employees were likely unlawful and criticized the authority exercised by the Office of Personnel Management.",
      "article_headline": "Judge finds mass firings of federal probationary workers were likely unlawful",
      "article_date": "2025-02-26"
    },
    {
      "name": "Everett Kelley",
      "organization": "American Federation of Government Employees",
      "role": "National President",
      "learned": "He hailed the court's decision as a victory for employees who were illegally fired.",
      "article_headline": "Judge finds mass firings of federal probationary workers were likely unlawful",
      "article_date": "2025-02-26"
    }

This data has been logged to LLM's SQLite database. We can retrieve the data back out again using the llm logs command like this:

llm logs -c --data

The -c flag means "use most recent conversation", and the --data flag outputs just the JSON data that was captured in the response.

We're going to want to use the same schema for other things. Schemas that we use are automatically logged to the database - we can view them using llm schemas:

llm schemas

Here's the output:

- id: 3b7702e71da3dd791d9e17b76c88730e
  summary: |
    {items: [{name, organization, role, learned, article_headline, article_date}]}
  usage: |
    1 time, most recently 2025-02-28T04:50:02.032081+00:00

To view the full schema, run that command with --full:

llm schemas --full

Which outputs:

- id: 3b7702e71da3dd791d9e17b76c88730e
  schema: |
    {
      "type": "object",
      "properties": {
        "items": {
          "type": "array",
          "items": {
            "type": "object",
            "properties": {
              "name": {
                "type": "string",
                "description": "the person's name"
              },
    ...

That 3b7702e71da3dd791d9e17b76c88730e ID can be used to run the same schema again. Let's try that now on a different URL:

curl 'https://apnews.com/article/bezos-katy-perry-blue-origin-launch-4a074e534baa664abfa6538159c12987' | \
  uvx strip-tags | \
  llm --schema 3b7702e71da3dd791d9e17b76c88730e \
    --system 'extract people mentioned in this article'

Here we are using --schema because our schema ID already corresponds to an array of items.

The result starts like this:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "Katy Perry",
      "organization": "Blue Origin",
      "role": "Singer",
      "learned": "Katy Perry will join the all-female celebrity crew for a spaceflight organized by Blue Origin.",
      "article_headline": "Katy Perry and Gayle King will join Jeff Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sanchez on Blue Origin spaceflight",
      "article_date": "2023-10-15"
    },

One more trick: let's turn our schema and system prompt combination into a template.

llm --schema 3b7702e71da3dd791d9e17b76c88730e \
  --system 'extract people mentioned in this article' \
  --save people

This creates a new template called "people". We can confirm the template was created correctly using:

llm templates show people

Which will output the YAML version of the template looking like this:

name: people
schema_object:
    properties:
        items:
            items:
                properties:
                    article_date:
                        description: the publication date in YYYY-MM-DD
                        type: string
                    article_headline:
                        description: the headline of the story
                        type: string
                    learned:
                        description: what we learned about them from this story
                        type: string
                    name:
                        description: the person's name
                        type: string
                    organization:
                        description: who they represent
                        type: string
                    role:
                        description: their job title or role
                        type: string
                required:
                - name
                - organization
                - role
                - learned
                - article_headline
                - article_date
                type: object
            type: array
    required:
    - items
    type: object
system: extract people mentioned in this article

We can now run our people extractor against another fresh URL. Let's use one from The Guardian:

curl https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/27/billy-mcfarland-new-fyre-festival-fantasist | \
  strip-tags | llm -t people

Storing the schema in a template means we can just use llm -t people to run the prompt. Here's what I got back:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "Billy McFarland",
      "organization": "Fyre Festival",
      "role": "Organiser",
      "learned": "Billy McFarland is known for organizing the infamous Fyre Festival and was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud related to it. He is attempting to revive the festival with Fyre 2.",
      "article_headline": "Welcome back Billy McFarland and a new Fyre festival. Shows you can’t keep a good fantasist down",
      "article_date": "2025-02-27"
    }
  ]
}

Depending on the model, schema extraction may work against images and PDF files as well.

I took a screenshot of part of this story in the Onion and saved it to the following URL:

https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/onion-zuck.jpg

We can pass that as an attachment using the -a option. This time let's use GPT-4o:

llm -t people -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/onion-zuck.jpg -m gpt-4o

Which gave me back this:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "Mark Zuckerberg",
      "organization": "Facebook",
      "role": "CEO",
      "learned": "He addressed criticism by suggesting anyone with similar values and thirst for power could make the same mistakes.",
      "article_headline": "Mark Zuckerberg Insists Anyone With Same Skewed Values And Unrelenting Thirst For Power Could Have Made Same Mistakes",
      "article_date": "2018-06-14"
    }
  ]
}

Now that we've extracted people from a number of different sources, let's load them into a database.

The llm logs command has several features for working with logged JSON objects. Since we've been recording multiple objects from each page in an "items" array using our people template we can access those using the following command:

llm logs --schema t:people --data-key items

In place of t:people we could use the 3b7702e71da3dd791d9e17b76c88730e schema ID or even the original schema string instead, see specifying a schema.

This command outputs newline-delimited JSON for every item that has been captured using the specified schema:

{"name": "Katy Perry", "organization": "Blue Origin", "role": "Singer", "learned": "She is one of the passengers on the upcoming spaceflight with Blue Origin."}
{"name": "Gayle King", "organization": "Blue Origin", "role": "TV Journalist", "learned": "She is participating in the upcoming Blue Origin spaceflight."}
{"name": "Lauren Sanchez", "organization": "Blue Origin", "role": "Helicopter Pilot and former TV Journalist", "learned": "She selected the crew for the Blue Origin spaceflight."}
{"name": "Aisha Bowe", "organization": "Engineering firm", "role": "Former NASA Rocket Scientist", "learned": "She is part of the crew for the spaceflight."}
{"name": "Amanda Nguyen", "organization": "Research Scientist", "role": "Activist and Scientist", "learned": "She is included in the crew for the upcoming Blue Origin flight."}
{"name": "Kerianne Flynn", "organization": "Movie Producer", "role": "Producer", "learned": "She will also be a passenger on the upcoming spaceflight."}
{"name": "Billy McFarland", "organization": "Fyre Festival", "role": "Organiser", "learned": "He was sentenced to six years in prison for wire fraud in 2018 and has launched a new festival called Fyre 2.", "article_headline": "Welcome back Billy McFarland and a new Fyre festival. Shows you can\u2019t keep a good fantasist down", "article_date": "2025-02-27"}
{"name": "Mark Zuckerberg", "organization": "Facebook", "role": "CEO", "learned": "He attempted to dismiss criticism by suggesting that anyone with similar values and thirst for power could have made the same mistakes.", "article_headline": "Mark Zuckerberg Insists Anyone With Same Skewed Values And Unrelenting Thirst For Power Could Have Made Same Mistakes", "article_date": "2018-06-14"}

If we add --data-array we'll get back a valid JSON array of objects instead:

llm logs --schema t:people --data-key items --data-array

Output starts:

[{"name": "Katy Perry", "organization": "Blue Origin", "role": "Singer", "learned": "She is one of the passengers on the upcoming spaceflight with Blue Origin."},
 {"name": "Gayle King", "organization": "Blue Origin", "role": "TV Journalist", "learned": "She is participating in the upcoming Blue Origin spaceflight."},

We can load this into a SQLite database using sqlite-utils, in particular the sqlite-utils insert command.

uv tool install sqlite-utils
# or pip install or pipx install

Now we can pipe the JSON into that tool to create a database with a people table:

llm logs --schema t:people --data-key items --data-array | \
  sqlite-utils insert data.db people -

To see a table of the name, organization and role columns use sqlite-utils rows:

sqlite-utils rows data.db people -t -c name -c organization -c role

Which produces:

name             organization        role
---------------  ------------------  -----------------------------------------
Katy Perry       Blue Origin         Singer
Gayle King       Blue Origin         TV Journalist
Lauren Sanchez   Blue Origin         Helicopter Pilot and former TV Journalist
Aisha Bowe       Engineering firm    Former NASA Rocket Scientist
Amanda Nguyen    Research Scientist  Activist and Scientist
Kerianne Flynn   Movie Producer      Producer
Billy McFarland  Fyre Festival       Organiser
Mark Zuckerberg  Facebook            CEO

We can also explore the database in a web interface using Datasette:

uvx datasette data.db
# Or install datasette first:
uv tool install datasette # or pip install or pipx install
datasette data.db

Visit http://127.0.0.1:8001/data/people to start navigating the data.

The above examples have both used concise schema syntax. LLM converts this format to JSON schema, and you can use JSON schema directly yourself if you wish.

JSON schema covers the following:

• The data types of fields (string, number, array, object, etc.)
• Required vs. optional fields
• Nested data structures
• Constraints on values (minimum/maximum, patterns, etc.)
• Descriptions of those fields - these can be used to guide the language model

Different models may support different subsets of the overall JSON schema language. You should experiment to figure out what works for the model you are using.

LLM recommends that the top level of the schema is an object, not an array, for increased compatibility across multiple models. I suggest using {"items": [array of objects]} if you want to return an array.

The dogs schema above, name, age int, one_sentence_bio, would look like this as a full JSON schema:

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "name": {
      "type": "string"
    },
    "age": {
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "one_sentence_bio": {
      "type": "string"
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "name",
    "age",
    "one_sentence_bio"
  ]
}

This JSON can be passed directly to the --schema option, or saved in a file and passed as the filename.

llm --schema '{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "name": {
      "type": "string"
    },
    "age": {
      "type": "integer"
    },
    "one_sentence_bio": {
      "type": "string"
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "name",
    "age",
    "one_sentence_bio"
  ]
}' 'a surprising dog'

Example output:

{
  "name": "Baxter",
  "age": 3,
  "one_sentence_bio": "Baxter is a rescue dog who learned to skateboard and now performs tricks at local parks, astonishing everyone with his skill!"
}

LLM accepts schema definitions for both running prompts and exploring logged responses, using the --schema option.

This option can take multiple forms:

• A string providing a JSON schema: --schema '{"type": "object", ...}'
• A condensed schema definition: --schema 'name,age int'
• The name or path of a file on disk containing a JSON schema: --schema dogs.schema.json
• The hexadecimal ID of a previously logged schema: --schema 520f7aabb121afd14d0c6c237b39ba2d - these IDs can be found using the llm schemas command.
• A schema that has been saved in a template: --schema t:name-of-template, see Saving reusable schemas in templates.

JSON schema's can be time-consuming to construct by hand. LLM also supports a concise alternative syntax for specifying a schema.

A simple schema for an object with two string properties called name and bio looks like this:

name, bio

You can include type information by adding a type indicator after the property name, separated by a space.

name, bio, age int

Supported types are int for integers, float for floating point numbers, str for strings (the default) and bool for true/false booleans.

To include a description of the field to act as a hint to the model, add one after a colon:

name: the person's name, age int: their age, bio: a short bio

If your schema is getting long you can switch from comma-separated to newline-separated, which also allows you to use commas in those descriptions:

name: the person's name
age int: their age
bio: a short bio, no more than three sentences

You can experiment with the syntax using the llm schemas dsl command, which converts the input into a JSON schema:

llm schemas dsl 'name, age int'

Output:

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "name": {
      "type": "string"
    },
    "age": {
      "type": "integer"
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "name",
    "age"
  ]
}

The Python utility function llm.schema_dsl(schema) can be used to convert this syntax into the equivalent JSON schema dictionary when working with schemas in the Python API.

If you want to store a schema with a name so you can reuse it easily in the future, the easiest way to do so is to save it in a template.

The quickest way to do that is with the llm --save option:

llm --schema 'name, age int, one_sentence_bio' --save dog

Now you can use it like this:

llm --schema t:dog 'invent a dog'

Or:

llm --schema-multi t:dog 'invent three dogs'

By default, all JSON produced using schemas is logged to a SQLite database. You can use special options to the llm logs command to extract just those JSON objects in a useful format.

The llm logs --schema X filter option can be used to filter just for responses that were created using the specified schema. You can pass the full schema JSON, a path to the schema on disk or the schema ID.

The --data option causes just the JSON data collected by that schema to be outputted, as newline-delimited JSON.

If you instead want a JSON array of objects (with starting and ending square braces) you can use --data-array instead.

Let's invent some dogs:

llm --schema-multi 'name, ten_word_bio' 'invent 3 cool dogs'
llm --schema-multi 'name, ten_word_bio' 'invent 2 cool dogs'

Having logged these cool dogs, you can see just the data that was returned by those prompts like this:

llm logs --schema-multi 'name, ten_word_bio' --data

We need to use --schema-multi here because we used that when we first created these records. The --schema option is also supported, and can be passed a filename or JSON schema or schema ID as well.

Output:

{"items": [{"name": "Robo", "ten_word_bio": "A cybernetic dog with laser eyes and super intelligence."}, {"name": "Flamepaw", "ten_word_bio": "Fire-resistant dog with a talent for agility and tricks."}]}
{"items": [{"name": "Bolt", "ten_word_bio": "Lightning-fast border collie, loves frisbee and outdoor adventures."}, {"name": "Luna", "ten_word_bio": "Mystical husky with mesmerizing blue eyes, enjoys snow and play."}, {"name": "Ziggy", "ten_word_bio": "Quirky pug who loves belly rubs and quirky outfits."}]}

Note that the dogs are nested in that "items" key. To access the list of items from that key use --data-key items:

llm logs --schema-multi 'name, ten_word_bio' --data-key items

Output:

{"name": "Bolt", "ten_word_bio": "Lightning-fast border collie, loves frisbee and outdoor adventures."}
{"name": "Luna", "ten_word_bio": "Mystical husky with mesmerizing blue eyes, enjoys snow and play."}
{"name": "Ziggy", "ten_word_bio": "Quirky pug who loves belly rubs and quirky outfits."}
{"name": "Robo", "ten_word_bio": "A cybernetic dog with laser eyes and super intelligence."}
{"name": "Flamepaw", "ten_word_bio": "Fire-resistant dog with a talent for agility and tricks."}

Finally, to output a JSON array instead of newline-delimited JSON use --data-array:

llm logs --schema-multi 'name, ten_word_bio' --data-key items --data-array

Output:

[{"name": "Bolt", "ten_word_bio": "Lightning-fast border collie, loves frisbee and outdoor adventures."},
 {"name": "Luna", "ten_word_bio": "Mystical husky with mesmerizing blue eyes, enjoys snow and play."},
 {"name": "Ziggy", "ten_word_bio": "Quirky pug who loves belly rubs and quirky outfits."},
 {"name": "Robo", "ten_word_bio": "A cybernetic dog with laser eyes and super intelligence."},
 {"name": "Flamepaw", "ten_word_bio": "Fire-resistant dog with a talent for agility and tricks."}]

Add --data-ids to include "response_id" and "conversation_id" fields in each of the returned objects reflecting the database IDs of the response and conversation they were a part of. This can be useful for tracking the source of each individual row.

llm logs --schema-multi 'name, ten_word_bio' --data-key items --data-ids

Output:

{"name": "Nebula", "ten_word_bio": "A cosmic puppy with starry fur, loves adventures in space.", "response_id": "01jn4dawj8sq0c6t3emf4k5ryx", "conversation_id": "01jn4dawj8sq0c6t3emf4k5ryx"}
{"name": "Echo", "ten_word_bio": "A clever hound with extraordinary hearing, master of hide-and-seek.", "response_id": "01jn4dawj8sq0c6t3emf4k5ryx", "conversation_id": "01jn4dawj8sq0c6t3emf4k5ryx"}
{"name": "Biscuit", "ten_word_bio": "An adorable chef dog, bakes treats that everyone loves.", "response_id": "01jn4dawj8sq0c6t3emf4k5ryx", "conversation_id": "01jn4dawj8sq0c6t3emf4k5ryx"}
{"name": "Cosmo", "ten_word_bio": "Galactic explorer, loves adventures and chasing shooting stars.", "response_id": "01jn4daycb3svj0x7kvp7zrp4q", "conversation_id": "01jn4daycb3svj0x7kvp7zrp4q"}
{"name": "Pixel", "ten_word_bio": "Tech-savvy pup, builds gadgets and loves virtual playtime.", "response_id": "01jn4daycb3svj0x7kvp7zrp4q", "conversation_id": "01jn4daycb3svj0x7kvp7zrp4q"}

If a row already has a property called "conversation_id" or "response_id" additional underscores will be appended to the ID key until it no longer overlaps with the existing keys.

The --id-gt $ID and --id-gte $ID options can be useful for ignoring logged schema data prior to a certain point, see Filtering past a specific ID for details.

A template can combine a prompt, system prompt, model, default model options, schema, and fragments into a single reusable unit.

Only one template can be used at a time. To compose multiple shorter pieces of prompts together consider using fragments instead.

The easiest way to create a template is using the --save template_name option.

Here's how to create a template for summarizing text:

llm '$input - summarize this' --save summarize

Put $input where you would like the user's input to be inserted. If you omit this their input will be added to the end of your regular prompt:

llm 'Summarize the following: ' --save summarize

You can also create templates using system prompts:

llm --system 'Summarize this' --save summarize

You can set the default model for a template using --model:

llm --system 'Summarize this' --model gpt-4o --save summarize

You can also save default options:

llm --system 'Speak in French' -o temperature 1.8 --save wild-french

If you want to include a literal $ sign in your prompt, use $$ instead:

llm --system 'Estimate the cost in $$ of this: $input' --save estimate

Use --tool/-T one or more times to add tools to the template:

llm -T llm_time --system 'Always include the current time in the answer' --save time

You can also use --functions to add Python function code directly to the template:

llm --functions 'def reverse_string(s): return s[::-1]' --system 'reverse any input' --save reverse
llm -t reverse 'Hello, world!'

Add --schema to bake a schema into your template:

llm --schema dog.schema.json 'invent a dog' --save dog

If you add --extract the setting to  extract the first fenced code block will be persisted in the template.

llm --system 'write a Python function' --extract --save python-function
llm -t python-function 'calculate haversine distance between two points'

In each of these cases the template will be saved in YAML format in a dedicated directory on disk.

You can execute a named template using the -t/--template option:

curl -s https://example.com/ | llm -t summarize

This can be combined with the -m option to specify a different model:

curl -s https://llm.datasette.io/en/latest/ | \
  llm -t summarize -m gpt-3.5-turbo-16k

Templates can also be specified as a direct path to a YAML file on disk:

llm -t path/to/template.yaml 'extra prompt here'

Or as a URL to a YAML file hosted online:

llm -t https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-templates/refs/heads/main/python-app.yaml \
  'Python app to pick a random line from a file'

Note that templates loaded via URLs will have any functions: keys ignored, to avoid accidentally executing arbitrary code. This restriction also applies to templates loaded via the template loaders plugin mechanism.

This command lists all available templates:

llm templates

The output looks something like this:

cmd        : system: reply with macos terminal commands only, no extra information
glados     : system: You are GlaDOS prompt: Summarize this:

Templates are stored as YAML files on disk.

You can edit (or create) a YAML file for a template using the llm templates edit command:

llm templates edit summarize

This will open the system default editor.

TIP:

export EDITOR="code -w"

You can create or edit template files directly in the templates directory. The location of this directory is shown by the llm templates path command:

llm templates path

Example output:

/Users/simon/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/templates

A basic YAML template looks like this:

prompt: 'Summarize this: $input'

Or use YAML multi-line strings for longer inputs. I created this using llm templates edit steampunk:

prompt: >
    Summarize the following text.

    Insert frequent satirical steampunk-themed illustrative anecdotes.
    Really go wild with that.

    Text to summarize: $input

The prompt: > causes the following indented text to be treated as a single string, with newlines collapsed to spaces. Use prompt: | to preserve newlines.

Running that with llm -t steampunk against GPT-4o (via strip-tags to remove HTML tags from the input and minify whitespace):

curl -s 'https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/imovie-slides-and-audio' | \
  strip-tags -m | llm -t steampunk -m gpt-4o

Output:

In a fantastical steampunk world, Simon Willison decided to merge an old MP3 recording with slides from the talk using iMovie. After exporting the slides as images and importing them into iMovie, he had to disable the default Ken Burns effect using the "Crop" tool. Then, Simon manually synchronized the audio by adjusting the duration of each image. Finally, he published the masterpiece to YouTube, with the whimsical magic of steampunk-infused illustrations leaving his viewers in awe.

When working with models that support system prompts you can set a system prompt using a system: key like so:

system: Summarize this

If you specify only a system prompt you don't need to use the $input variable - llm will use the user's input as the whole of the regular prompt, which will then be processed using the instructions set in that system prompt.

You can combine system and regular prompts like so:

system: You speak like an excitable Victorian adventurer
prompt: 'Summarize this: $input'

Templates can reference Fragments using the fragments: and system_fragments: keys. These should be a list of fragment URLs, filepaths or hashes:

fragments:
- https://example.com/robots.txt
- /path/to/file.txt
- 993fd38d898d2b59fd2d16c811da5bdac658faa34f0f4d411edde7c17ebb0680
system_fragments:
- https://example.com/systm-prompt.txt

Default options can be set using the options: key:

name: wild-french
system: Speak in French
options:
  temperature: 1.8

The tools: key can provide a list of tool names from other plugins - either function names or toolbox specifiers:

name: time-plus
tools:
- llm_time
- Datasette("https://example.com/timezone-lookup")

The functions: key can provide a multi-line string of Python code defining additional functions:

name: my-functions
functions: |
  def reverse_string(s: str):
      return s[::-1]

  def greet(name: str):
      return f"Hello, {name}!"

Use the schema_object: key to embed a JSON schema (as YAML) in your template. The easiest way to create these is with the llm --schema ... --save name-of-template command - the result should look something like this:

name: dogs
schema_object:
    properties:
        dogs:
            items:
                properties:
                    bio:
                        type: string
                    name:
                        type: string
                type: object
            type: array
    type: object

Templates that work against the user's normal prompt input (content that is either piped to the tool via standard input or passed as a command-line argument) can use the $input variable.

You can use additional named variables. These will then need to be provided using the -p/--param option when executing the template.

Here's an example YAML template called recipe, which you can create using llm templates edit recipe:

prompt: |
    Suggest a recipe using ingredients: $ingredients

    It should be based on cuisine from this country: $country

This can be executed like so:

llm -t recipe -p ingredients 'sausages, milk' -p country Germany

My output started like this:

This example combines input piped to the tool with additional parameters. Call this summarize:

system: Summarize this text in the voice of $voice

Then to run it:

curl -s 'https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/imovie-slides-and-audio' | \
  strip-tags -m | llm -t summarize -p voice GlaDOS

I got this:

When creating a template using the --save option you can pass -p name value to store the default values for parameters:

llm --system 'Summarize this text in the voice of $voice' \
  --model gpt-4o -p voice GlaDOS --save summarize

You can specify default values for parameters in the YAML using the defaults: key.

system: Summarize this text in the voice of $voice
defaults:
  voice: GlaDOS

When running without -p it will choose the default:

curl -s 'https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/imovie-slides-and-audio' | \
  strip-tags -m | llm -t summarize

But you can override the defaults with -p:

curl -s 'https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/imovie-slides-and-audio' | \
  strip-tags -m | llm -t summarize -p voice Yoda

I got this:

To configure the extract first fenced code block setting for the template, add this:

extract: true

Templates executed using llm -t template-name will execute using the default model that the user has configured for the tool - or gpt-3.5-turbo if they have not configured their own default.

You can specify a new default model for a template using the model: key in the associated YAML. Here's a template called roast:

model: gpt-4o
system: roast the user at every possible opportunity, be succinct

Example:

llm -t roast 'How are you today?'

LLM plugins can register prefixes that can be used to load templates from external sources.

llm-templates-github is an example which adds a gh: prefix which can be used to load templates from GitHub.

You can install that plugin like this:

llm install llm-templates-github

Use the llm templates loaders command to see details of the registered loaders.

llm templates loaders

Output:

gh:
  Load a template from GitHub or local cache if available

  Format: username/repo/template_name (without the .yaml extension)
    or username/template_name which means username/llm-templates/template_name

Then you can then use it like this:

curl -sL 'https://llm.datasette.io/' | llm -t gh:simonw/summarize

The -sL flags to curl are used to follow redirects and suppress progress meters.

This command will fetch the content of the LLM index page and feed it to the template defined by summarize.yaml in the simonw/llm-templates GitHub repository.

If two template loader plugins attempt to register the same prefix one of them will have _1 added to the end of their prefix. Use llm templates loaders to check if this has occurred.

LLM prompts can optionally be composed out of fragments - reusable pieces of text that are logged just once to the database and can then be attached to multiple prompts.

These are particularly useful when you are working with long context models, which support feeding large amounts of text in as part of your prompt.

Fragments primarily exist to save space in the database, but may be used to support other features such as vendor prompt caching as well.

Fragments can be specified using several different mechanisms:

• URLs to text files online
• Paths to text files on disk
• Aliases that have been attached to a specific fragment
• Hash IDs of stored fragments, where the ID is the SHA256 hash of the fragment content
• Fragments that are provided by custom plugins - these look like plugin-name:argument

Use the -f/--fragment option to specify one or more fragments to be used as part of your prompt:

llm -f https://llm.datasette.io/robots.txt "Explain this robots.txt file in detail"

Here we are specifying a fragment using a URL. The contents of that URL will be included in the prompt that is sent to the model, prepended prior to the prompt text.

The -f option can be used multiple times to combine together multiple fragments.

Fragments can also be files on disk, for example:

llm -f setup.py 'extract the metadata'

Use - to specify a fragment that is read from standard input:

llm -f - 'extract the metadata' < setup.py

This will read the contents of setup.py from standard input and use it as a fragment.

Fragments can also be used as part of your system prompt. Use --sf value or --system-fragment value instead of -f.

The chat command also supports the -f and --sf arguments to start a chat with fragments.

llm chat -f my_doc.txt
Chatting with gpt-4
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt.
Type '!fragment <my_fragment> [<another_fragment> ...]' to insert one or more fragments
> Explain this document to me

Fragments can also be added during a chat conversation using the !fragment <my_fragment> command.

Chatting with gpt-4
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt.
Type '!fragment <my_fragment> [<another_fragment> ...]' to insert one or more fragments
> !fragment https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/fragments.html

This can be combined with !multi:

> !multi
Explain the difference between fragments and templates to me
!fragment https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/fragments.html https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/templates.html
!end

Any !fragment lines found in a prompt created with !edit will not be parsed.

You can view a truncated version of the fragments you have previously stored in your database with the llm fragments command:

llm fragments

The output from that command looks like this:

- hash: 0d6e368f9bc21f8db78c01e192ecf925841a957d8b991f5bf9f6239aa4d81815
  aliases: []
  datetime_utc: '2025-04-06 07:36:53'
  source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-docs/refs/heads/main/llm/0.22.txt
  content: |-
    <documents>
    <document index="1">
    <source>docs/aliases.md</source>
    <document_content>
    (aliases)=
    #...
- hash: 16b686067375182573e2aa16b5bfc1e64d48350232535d06444537e51f1fd60c
  aliases: []
  datetime_utc: '2025-04-06 23:03:47'
  source: simonw/files-to-prompt/pyproject.toml
  content: |-
    [project]
    name = "files-to-prompt"
    version = "0.6"
    description = "Concatenate a directory full of...

Those long hash values are IDs that can be used to reference a fragment in the future:

llm -f 16b686067375182573e2aa16b5bfc1e64d48350232535d06444537e51f1fd60c 'Extract metadata'

Use -q searchterm one or more times to search for fragments that match a specific set of search terms.

To view the full content of a fragment use llm fragments show:

llm fragments show 0d6e368f9bc21f8db78c01e192ecf925841a957d8b991f5bf9f6239aa4d81815

You can assign aliases to fragments that you use often using the llm fragments set command:

llm fragments set mydocs ./docs.md

To remove an alias, use llm fragments remove:

llm fragments remove mydocs

You can then use that alias in place of the fragment hash ID:

llm -f mydocs 'How do I access metadata?'

Use llm fragments --aliases to see a full list of fragments that have been assigned aliases:

llm fragments --aliases

The llm logs command lists the fragments that were used for a prompt. By default these are listed as fragment hash IDs, but you can use the --expand option to show the full content of each fragment.

This command will show the expanded fragments for your most recent conversation:

llm logs -c --expand

You can filter for logs that used a specific fragment using the -f/--fragment option:

llm logs -c -f 0d6e368f9bc21f8db78c01e192ecf925841a957d8b991f5bf9f6239aa4d81815

This accepts URLs, file paths, aliases, and hash IDs.

Multiple -f options will return responses that used all of the specified fragments.

Fragments are returned by llm logs --json as well. By default these are truncated but you can add the -e/--expand option to show the full content of each fragment.

llm logs -c --json --expand

LLM plugins can provide custom fragment loaders which do useful things.

One example is the llm-fragments-github plugin. This can convert the files from a public GitHub repository into a list of fragments, allowing you to ask questions about the full repository.

Here's how to try that out:

llm install llm-fragments-github
llm -f github:simonw/s3-credentials 'Suggest new features for this tool'

This plugin turns a single call to -f github:simonw/s3-credentials into multiple fragments, one for every text file in the simonw/s3-credentials GitHub repository.

Running llm logs -c will show that this prompt incorporated 26 fragments, one for each file.

Running llm logs -c --usage --expand (shortcut: llm logs -cue) includes token usage information and turns each fragment ID into a full copy of that file. Here's the output of that command.

Fragment plugins can return attachments (such as images) as well.

See the register_fragment_loaders() plugin hook documentation for details on writing your own custom fragment plugin.

The llm fragments loaders command shows all prefixes that have been installed by plugins, along with their documentation:

llm install llm-fragments-github
llm fragments loaders

Example output:

github:
  Load files from a GitHub repository as fragments

  Argument is a GitHub repository URL or username/repository

issue:
  Fetch GitHub issue and comments as Markdown

  Argument is either "owner/repo/NUMBER"
  or "https://github.com/owner/repo/issues/NUMBER"

LLM supports model aliases, which allow you to refer to a model by a short name instead of its full ID.

To list current aliases, run this:

llm aliases

Example output:

4o                  : gpt-4o
chatgpt-4o          : chatgpt-4o-latest
4o-mini             : gpt-4o-mini
4.1                 : gpt-4.1
4.1-mini            : gpt-4.1-mini
4.1-nano            : gpt-4.1-nano
3.5                 : gpt-3.5-turbo
chatgpt             : gpt-3.5-turbo
chatgpt-16k         : gpt-3.5-turbo-16k
3.5-16k             : gpt-3.5-turbo-16k
4                   : gpt-4
gpt4                : gpt-4
4-32k               : gpt-4-32k
gpt-4-turbo-preview : gpt-4-turbo
4-turbo             : gpt-4-turbo
4t                  : gpt-4-turbo
gpt-4.5             : gpt-4.5-preview
3.5-instruct        : gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct
chatgpt-instruct    : gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct
ada                 : text-embedding-ada-002 (embedding)
ada-002             : text-embedding-ada-002 (embedding)
3-small             : text-embedding-3-small (embedding)
3-large             : text-embedding-3-large (embedding)
3-small-512         : text-embedding-3-small-512 (embedding)
3-large-256         : text-embedding-3-large-256 (embedding)
3-large-1024        : text-embedding-3-large-1024 (embedding)

Add --json to get that list back as JSON:

llm aliases list --json

Example output:

{
    "3.5": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
    "chatgpt": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
    "4": "gpt-4",
    "gpt4": "gpt-4",
    "ada": "ada-002"
}

The llm aliases set <alias> <model-id> command can be used to add a new alias:

llm aliases set mini gpt-4o-mini

You can also pass one or more -q search options to set an alias on the first model matching those search terms:

llm aliases set mini -q 4o -q mini

Now you can run the gpt-4o-mini model using the mini alias like this:

llm -m mini 'An epic Greek-style saga about a cheesecake that builds a SQL database from scratch'

Aliases can be set for both regular models and embedding models using the same command. To set an alias of oai for the OpenAI ada-002 embedding model use this:

llm aliases set oai ada-002

Now you can embed a string using that model like so:

llm embed -c 'hello world' -m oai

Output:

[-0.014945968054234982, 0.0014304015785455704, ...]

The llm aliases remove <alias> command will remove the specified alias:

llm aliases remove mini

Aliases are stored in an aliases.json file in the LLM configuration directory.

To see the path to that file, run this:

llm aliases path

To view the content of that file, run this:

cat "$(llm aliases path)"

Embedding models allow you to take a piece of text - a word, sentence, paragraph or even a whole article, and convert that into an array of floating point numbers.

This floating point array is called an "embedding vector", and works as a numerical representation of the semantic meaning of the content in a many-multi-dimensional space.

By calculating the distance between embedding vectors, we can identify which content is semantically "nearest" to other content.

This can be used to build features like related article lookups. It can also be used to build semantic search, where a user can search for a phrase and get back results that are semantically similar to that phrase even if they do not share any exact keywords.

Some embedding models like CLIP can even work against binary files such as images. These can be used to search for images that are similar to other images, or to search for images that are semantically similar to a piece of text.

LLM supports multiple embedding models through plugins. Once installed, an embedding model can be used on the command-line or via the Python API to calculate and store embeddings for content, and then to perform similarity searches against those embeddings.

See LLM now provides tools for working with embeddings for an extended explanation of embeddings, why they are useful and what you can do with them.

LLM provides command-line utilities for calculating and storing embeddings for pieces of content.

The llm embed command can be used to calculate embedding vectors for a string of content. These can be returned directly to the terminal, stored in a SQLite database, or both.

The simplest way to use this command is to pass content to it using the -c/--content option, like this:

llm embed -c 'This is some content' -m 3-small

-m 3-small specifies the OpenAI text-embedding-3-small model. You will need to have set an OpenAI API key using llm keys set openai for this to work.

You can install plugins to access other models. The llm-sentence-transformers plugin can be used to run models on your own laptop, such as the MiniLM-L6 model:

llm install llm-sentence-transformers
llm embed -c 'This is some content' -m sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2

The llm embed command returns a JSON array of floating point numbers directly to the terminal:

[0.123, 0.456, 0.789...]

You can omit the -m/--model option if you set a default embedding model.

You can also set the LLM_EMBEDDING_MODEL environment variable to set a default model for all llm embed commands in the current shell session:

export LLM_EMBEDDING_MODEL=3-small
llm embed -c 'This is some content'

LLM also offers a binary storage format for embeddings, described in embeddings storage format.

You can output embeddings using that format as raw bytes using --format blob, or in hexadecimal using --format hex, or in Base64 using --format base64:

llm embed -c 'This is some content' -m 3-small --format base64

This outputs:

8NGzPFtdgTqHcZw7aUT6u+++WrwwpZo8XbSxv...

Some models such as llm-clip can run against binary data. You can pass in binary data using the -i and --binary options:

llm embed --binary -m clip -i image.jpg

Or from standard input like this:

cat image.jpg | llm embed --binary -m clip -i -

Embeddings are much more useful if you store them somewhere, so you can calculate similarity scores between different embeddings later on.

LLM includes the concept of a collection of embeddings. A collection groups together a set of stored embeddings created using the same model, each with a unique ID within that collection.

Embeddings also store a hash of the content that was embedded. This hash is later used to avoid calculating duplicate embeddings for the same content.

First, we'll set a default model so we don't have to keep repeating it:

llm embed-models default 3-small

The llm embed command can store results directly in a named collection like this:

llm embed quotations philkarlton-1 -c \
  'There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things'

This stores the given text in the quotations collection under the key philkarlton-1.

You can also pipe content to standard input, like this:

cat one.txt | llm embed files one

This will store the embedding for the contents of one.txt in the files collection under the key one.

A collection will be created the first time you mention it.

Collections have a fixed embedding model, which is the model that was used for the first embedding stored in that collection.

In the above example this would have been the default embedding model at the time that the command was run.

The following example stores the embedding for the string "my happy hound" in a collection called phrases under the key hound and using the model 3-small:

llm embed phrases hound -m 3-small -c 'my happy hound'

By default, the SQLite database used to store embeddings is the embeddings.db in the user content directory managed by LLM.

You can see the path to this directory by running llm collections path.

You can store embeddings in a different SQLite database by passing a path to it using the -d/--database option to llm embed. If this file does not exist yet the command will create it:

llm embed phrases hound -d my-embeddings.db -c 'my happy hound'

This creates a database file called my-embeddings.db in the current directory.

By default, only the entry ID and the embedding vector are stored in the database table.

You can store a copy of the original text in the content column by passing the --store option:

llm embed phrases hound -c 'my happy hound' --store

You can also store a JSON object containing arbitrary metadata in the metadata column by passing the --metadata option. This example uses both --store and --metadata options:

llm embed phrases hound \
  -m 3-small \
  -c 'my happy hound' \
  --metadata '{"name": "Hound"}' \
  --store

Data stored in this way will be returned by calls to llm similar, for example:

llm similar phrases -c 'hound'

{"id": "hound", "score": 0.8484683588631485, "content": "my happy hound", "metadata": {"name": "Hound"}}

The llm embed command embeds a single string at a time.

llm embed-multi can be used to embed multiple strings at once, taking advantage of any efficiencies that the embedding model may provide when processing multiple strings.

This command can be called in one of three ways:

1. With a CSV, TSV, JSON or newline-delimited JSON file
2. With a SQLite database and a SQL query
3. With one or more paths to directories, each accompanied by a glob pattern

All three mechanisms support these options:

• -m model_id to specify the embedding model to use
• -d database.db to specify a different database file to store the embeddings in
• --store to store the original content in the embeddings table in addition to the embedding vector
• --prefix to prepend a prefix to the stored ID of each item
• --prepend to prepend a string to the content before embedding
• --batch-size SIZE to process embeddings in batches of the specified size

The --prepend option is useful for embedding models that require you to prepend a special token to the content before embedding it. nomic-embed-text-v2-moe for example requires documents to be prepended 'search_document: ' and search queries to be prepended 'search_query: '.

You can embed data from a CSV, TSV or JSON file by passing that file to the command as the second option, after the collection name.

Your file must contain at least two columns. The first one is expected to contain the ID of the item, and any subsequent columns will be treated as containing content to be embedded.

An example CSV file might look like this:

id,content
one,This is the first item
two,This is the second item

TSV would use tabs instead of commas.

JSON files can be structured like this:

[
  {"id": "one", "content": "This is the first item"},
  {"id": "two", "content": "This is the second item"}
]

Or as newline-delimited JSON like this:

{"id": "one", "content": "This is the first item"}
{"id": "two", "content": "This is the second item"}

In each of these cases the file can be passed to llm embed-multi like this:

llm embed-multi items mydata.csv

The first argument is the name of the collection, the second is the filename.

You can also pipe content to standard input of the tool using -:

cat mydata.json | llm embed-multi items -

LLM will attempt to detect the format of your data automatically. If this doesn't work you can specify the format using the --format option. This is required if you are piping newline-delimited JSON to standard input.

cat mydata.json | llm embed-multi items - --format nl

Other supported --format options are csv, tsv and json.

This example embeds the data from a JSON file in a collection called items in database called docs.db using the 3-small model and stores the original content in the embeddings table as well, adding a prefix of my-items/ to each ID:

llm embed-multi items mydata.json \
  -d docs.db \
  -m 3-small \
  --prefix my-items/ \
  --store

You can embed data from a SQLite database using --sql, optionally combined with --attach to attach an additional database.

If you are storing embeddings in the same database as the source data, you can do this:

llm embed-multi docs \
  -d docs.db \
  --sql 'select id, title, content from documents' \
  -m 3-small

The docs.db database here contains a documents table, and we want to embed the title and content columns from that table and store the results back in the same database.

To load content from a database other than the one you are using to store embeddings, attach it with the --attach option and use alias.table in your SQLite query:

llm embed-multi docs \
  -d embeddings.db \
  --attach other other.db \
  --sql 'select id, title, content from other.documents' \
  -m 3-small

LLM can embed the content of every text file in a specified directory, using the file's path and name as the ID.

Consider a directory structure like this:

docs/aliases.md
docs/contributing.md
docs/embeddings/binary.md
docs/embeddings/cli.md
docs/embeddings/index.md
docs/index.md
docs/logging.md
docs/plugins/directory.md
docs/plugins/index.md

To embed all of those documents, you can run the following:

llm embed-multi documentation \
  -m 3-small \
  --files docs '**/*.md' \
  -d documentation.db \
  --store

Here --files docs '**/*.md' specifies that the docs directory should be scanned for files matching the **/*.md glob pattern - which will match Markdown files in any nested directory.

The result of the above command is a embeddings table with the following IDs:

aliases.md
contributing.md
embeddings/binary.md
embeddings/cli.md
embeddings/index.md
index.md
logging.md
plugins/directory.md
plugins/index.md

Each corresponding to embedded content for the file in question.

The --prefix option can be used to add a prefix to each ID:

llm embed-multi documentation \
  -m 3-small \
  --files docs '**/*.md' \
  -d documentation.db \
  --store \
  --prefix llm-docs/

This will result in the following IDs instead:

llm-docs/aliases.md
llm-docs/contributing.md
llm-docs/embeddings/binary.md
llm-docs/embeddings/cli.md
llm-docs/embeddings/index.md
llm-docs/index.md
llm-docs/logging.md
llm-docs/plugins/directory.md
llm-docs/plugins/index.md

Files are assumed to be utf-8, but LLM will fall back to latin-1 if it encounters an encoding error. You can specify a different set of encodings using the --encoding option.

This example will try utf-16 first and then mac_roman before falling back to latin-1:

llm embed-multi documentation \
  -m 3-small \
  --files docs '**/*.md' \
  -d documentation.db \
  --encoding utf-16 \
  --encoding mac_roman \
  --encoding latin-1

If a file cannot be read it will be logged to standard error but the script will keep on running.

If you are embedding binary content such as images for use with CLIP, add the --binary option:

llm embed-multi photos \
  -m clip \
  --files photos/ '*.jpeg' --binary

The llm similar command searches a collection of embeddings for the items that are most similar to a given or item ID, based on cosine similarity.

This currently uses a slow brute-force approach which does not scale well to large collections. See issue 216 for plans to add a more scalable approach via vector indexes provided by plugins.

To search the quotations collection for items that are semantically similar to 'computer science':

llm similar quotations -c 'computer science'

This embeds the provided string and returns a newline-delimited list of JSON objects like this:

{"id": "philkarlton-1", "score": 0.8323904531677017, "content": null, "metadata": null}

Use -p/--plain to get back results in plain text instead of JSON:

llm similar quotations -c 'computer science' -p

Example output:

philkarlton-1 (0.8323904531677017)

You can compare against text stored in a file using -i filename:

llm similar quotations -i one.txt

Or feed text to standard input using -i -:

echo 'computer science' | llm similar quotations -i -

When using a model like CLIP, you can find images similar to an input image using -i filename with --binary:

llm similar photos -i image.jpg --binary

You can filter results to only show IDs that begin with a specific prefix using --prefix:

llm similar quotations --prefix 'movies/' -c 'star wars'

To list all available embedding models, including those provided by plugins, run this command:

llm embed-models

The output should look something like this:

OpenAIEmbeddingModel: text-embedding-ada-002 (aliases: ada, ada-002)
OpenAIEmbeddingModel: text-embedding-3-small (aliases: 3-small)
OpenAIEmbeddingModel: text-embedding-3-large (aliases: 3-large)
...

Add -q one or more times to search for models matching those terms:

llm embed-models -q 3-small

This command can be used to get and set the default embedding model.

This will return the name of the current default model:

llm embed-models default

You can set a different default like this:

llm embed-models default 3-small

This will set the default model to OpenAI's 3-small model.

Any of the supported aliases for a model can be passed to this command.

You can unset the default model using --remove-default:

llm embed-models default --remove-default

When no default model is set, the llm embed and llm embed-multi commands will require that a model is specified using -m/--model.

To list all of the collections in the embeddings database, run this command:

llm collections list

Add --json for JSON output:

llm collections list --json

Add -d/--database to specify a different database file:

llm collections list -d my-embeddings.db

To delete a collection from the database, run this:

llm collections delete collection-name

Pass -d to specify a different database file:

llm collections delete collection-name -d my-embeddings.db

You can load an embedding model using its model ID or alias like this:

import llm

embedding_model = llm.get_embedding_model("3-small")

To embed a string, returning a Python list of floating point numbers, use the .embed() method:

vector = embedding_model.embed("my happy hound")

If the embedding model can handle binary input, you can call .embed() with a byte string instead. You can check the supports_binary property to see if this is supported:

if embedding_model.supports_binary:
    vector = embedding_model.embed(open("my-image.jpg", "rb").read())

The embedding_model.supports_text property indicates if the model supports text input.

Many embeddings models are more efficient when you embed multiple strings or binary strings at once. To embed multiple strings at once, use the .embed_multi() method:

vectors = list(embedding_model.embed_multi(["my happy hound", "my dissatisfied cat"]))

This returns a generator that yields one embedding vector per string.

Embeddings are calculated in batches. By default all items will be processed in a single batch, unless the underlying embedding model has defined its own preferred batch size. You can pass a custom batch size using batch_size=N, for example:

vectors = list(embedding_model.embed_multi(lines_from_file, batch_size=20))

The llm.Collection class can be used to work with collections of embeddings from Python code.

A collection is a named group of embedding vectors, each stored along with their IDs in a SQLite database table.

To work with embeddings in this way you will need an instance of a sqlite-utils Database object. You can then pass that to the llm.Collection constructor along with the unique string name of the collection and the ID of the embedding model you will be using with that collection:

import sqlite_utils
import llm

# This collection will use an in-memory database that will be
# discarded when the Python process exits
collection = llm.Collection("entries", model_id="3-small")

# Or you can persist the database to disk like this:
db = sqlite_utils.Database("my-embeddings.db")
collection = llm.Collection("entries", db, model_id="3-small")

# You can pass a model directly using model= instead of model_id=
embedding_model = llm.get_embedding_model("3-small")
collection = llm.Collection("entries", db, model=embedding_model)

If the collection already exists in the database you can omit the model or model_id argument - the model ID will be read from the collections table.

To embed a single string and store it in the collection, use the embed() method:

collection.embed("hound", "my happy hound")

This stores the embedding for the string "my happy hound" in the entries collection under the key hound.

Add store=True to store the text content itself in the database table along with the embedding vector.

To attach additional metadata to an item, pass a JSON-compatible dictionary as the metadata= argument:

collection.embed("hound", "my happy hound", metadata={"name": "Hound"}, store=True)

This additional metadata will be stored as JSON in the metadata column of the embeddings database table.

The collection.embed_multi() method can be used to store embeddings for multiple items at once. This can be more efficient for some embedding models.

collection.embed_multi(
    [
        ("hound", "my happy hound"),
        ("cat", "my dissatisfied cat"),
    ],
    # Add this to store the strings in the content column:
    store=True,
)

To include metadata to be stored with each item, call embed_multi_with_metadata():

collection.embed_multi_with_metadata(
    [
        ("hound", "my happy hound", {"name": "Hound"}),
        ("cat", "my dissatisfied cat", {"name": "Cat"}),
    ],
    # This can also take the store=True argument:
    store=True,
)

The batch_size= argument defaults to 100, and will be used unless the embedding model itself defines a lower batch size. You can adjust this if you are having trouble with memory while embedding large collections:

collection.embed_multi(
    (
        (i, line)
        for i, line in enumerate(lines_in_file)
    ),
    batch_size=10
)

A collection instance has the following properties and methods:

• id - the integer ID of the collection in the database
• name - the string name of the collection (unique in the database)
• model_id - the string ID of the embedding model used for this collection
• model() - returns the EmbeddingModel instance, based on that model_id
• count() - returns the integer number of items in the collection
• embed(id: str, text: str, metadata: dict=None, store: bool=False) - embeds the given string and stores it in the collection under the given ID. Can optionally include metadata (stored as JSON) and store the text content itself in the database table.
• embed_multi(entries: Iterable, store: bool=False, batch_size: int=100) - see above
• embed_multi_with_metadata(entries: Iterable, store: bool=False, batch_size: int=100) - see above
• similar(query: str, number: int=10) - returns a list of entries that are most similar to the embedding of the given query string
• similar_by_id(id: str, number: int=10) - returns a list of entries that are most similar to the embedding of the item with the given ID
• similar_by_vector(vector: List[float], number: int=10, skip_id: str=None) - returns a list of entries that are most similar to the given embedding vector, optionally skipping the entry with the given ID
• delete() - deletes the collection and its embeddings from the database

There is also a Collection.exists(db, name) class method which returns a boolean value and can be used to determine if a collection exists or not in a database:

if Collection.exists(db, "entries"):
    print("The entries collection exists")

Once you have populated a collection of embeddings you can retrieve the entries that are most similar to a given string using the similar() method.

This method uses a brute force approach, calculating distance scores against every document. This is fine for small collections, but will not scale to large collections. See issue 216 for plans to add a more scalable approach via vector indexes provided by plugins.

for entry in collection.similar("hound"):
    print(entry.id, entry.score)

The string will first by embedded using the model for the collection.

The entry object returned is an object with the following properties:

• id - the string ID of the item
• score - the floating point similarity score between the item and the query string
• content - the string text content of the item, if it was stored - or None
• metadata - the dictionary (from JSON) metadata for the item, if it was stored - or None

This defaults to returning the 10 most similar items. You can change this by passing a different number= argument:

for entry in collection.similar("hound", number=5):
    print(entry.id, entry.score)

The similar_by_id() method takes the ID of another item in the collection and returns the most similar items to that one, based on the embedding that has already been stored for it:

for entry in collection.similar_by_id("cat"):
    print(entry.id, entry.score)

The item itself is excluded from the results.

Here's the SQL schema used by the embeddings database:

CREATE TABLE [collections] (
   [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
   [name] TEXT,
   [model] TEXT
)
CREATE TABLE "embeddings" (
   [collection_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [collections]([id]),
   [id] TEXT,
   [embedding] BLOB,
   [content] TEXT,
   [content_blob] BLOB,
   [content_hash] BLOB,
   [metadata] TEXT,
   [updated] INTEGER,
   PRIMARY KEY ([collection_id], [id])
)

Read the plugin tutorial for details on how to develop and package a plugin.

This page shows an example plugin that implements and registers a new embedding model.

There are two components to an embedding model plugin:

1. An implementation of the register_embedding_models() hook, which takes a register callback function and calls it to register the new model with the LLM plugin system.

2. A class that extends the llm.EmbeddingModel abstract base class.

   The only required method on this class is embed_batch(texts), which takes an iterable of strings and returns an iterator over lists of floating point numbers.

The following example uses the sentence-transformers package to provide access to the MiniLM-L6 embedding model.

import llm
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer


@llm.hookimpl
def register_embedding_models(register):
    model_id = "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"
    register(SentenceTransformerModel(model_id, model_id), aliases=("all-MiniLM-L6-v2",))


class SentenceTransformerModel(llm.EmbeddingModel):
    def __init__(self, model_id, model_name):
        self.model_id = model_id
        self.model_name = model_name
        self._model = None

    def embed_batch(self, texts):
        if self._model is None:
            self._model = SentenceTransformer(self.model_name)
        results = self._model.encode(texts)
        return (list(map(float, result)) for result in results)

Once installed, the model provided by this plugin can be used with the llm embed command like this:

cat file.txt | llm embed -m sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2

Or via its registered alias like this:

cat file.txt | llm embed -m all-MiniLM-L6-v2

llm-sentence-transformers is a complete example of a plugin that provides an embedding model.

Execute Jina embeddings with a CLI using llm-embed-jina talks through a similar process to add support for the Jina embeddings models.

If your model can embed binary content, use the supports_binary property to indicate that:

class ClipEmbeddingModel(llm.EmbeddingModel):
    model_id = "clip"
    supports_binary = True
    supports_text= True

supports_text defaults to True and so is not necessary here. You can set it to False if your model only supports binary data.

If your model accepts binary, your .embed_batch() model may be called with a list of Python bytestrings. These may be mixed with regular strings if the model accepts both types of input.

llm-clip is an example of a model that can embed both binary and text content.

The default output format of the llm embed command is a JSON array of floating point numbers.

LLM stores embeddings in space-efficient format: a little-endian binary sequences of 32-bit floating point numbers, each represented using 4 bytes.

These are stored in a BLOB column in a SQLite database.

The following Python functions can be used to convert between this format and an array of floating point numbers:

import struct

def encode(values):
    return struct.pack("<" + "f" * len(values), *values)

def decode(binary):
    return struct.unpack("<" + "f" * (len(binary) // 4), binary)

These functions are available as llm.encode() and llm.decode().

If you are using NumPy you can decode one of these binary values like this:

import numpy as np

numpy_array = np.frombuffer(value, "<f4")

The <f4 format string here ensures NumPy will treat the data as a little-endian sequence of 32-bit floats.

LLM plugins can enhance LLM by making alternative Large Language Models available, either via API or by running the models locally on your machine.

Plugins can also add new commands to the llm CLI tool.

The plugin directory lists available plugins that you can install and use.

Developing a model plugin describes how to build a new plugin in detail.

Plugins must be installed in the same virtual environment as LLM itself.

You can find names of plugins to install in the plugin directory

Use the llm install command (a thin wrapper around pip install) to install plugins in the correct environment:

llm install llm-gpt4all

Plugins can be uninstalled with llm uninstall:

llm uninstall llm-gpt4all -y

The -y flag skips asking for confirmation.

You can see additional models that have been added by plugins by running:

llm models

Or add --options to include details of the options available for each model:

llm models --options

To run a prompt against a newly installed model, pass its name as the -m/--model option:

llm -m orca-mini-3b-gguf2-q4_0 'What is the capital of France?'

Run llm plugins to list installed plugins:

llm plugins

[
  {
    "name": "llm-anthropic",
    "hooks": [
      "register_models"
    ],
    "version": "0.11"
  },
  {
    "name": "llm-gguf",
    "hooks": [
      "register_commands",
      "register_models"
    ],
    "version": "0.1a0"
  },
  {
    "name": "llm-clip",
    "hooks": [
      "register_commands",
      "register_embedding_models"
    ],
    "version": "0.1"
  },
  {
    "name": "llm-cmd",
    "hooks": [
      "register_commands"
    ],
    "version": "0.2a0"
  },
  {
    "name": "llm-gemini",
    "hooks": [
      "register_embedding_models",
      "register_models"
    ],
    "version": "0.3"
  }
]

By default, LLM will load all plugins that are installed in the same virtual environment as LLM itself.

You can control the set of plugins that is loaded using the LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS environment variable.

Set that to the empty string to disable all plugins:

LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS='' llm ...

Or to a comma-separated list of plugin names to load only those plugins:

LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS='llm-gpt4all,llm-cluster' llm ...

You can use the llm plugins command to check that it is working correctly:

LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS='' llm plugins

The following plugins are available for LLM. Here's how to install them.

These plugins all help you run LLMs directly on your own computer:

• llm-gguf uses llama.cpp to run models published in the GGUF format.
• llm-mlx (Mac only) uses Apple's MLX framework to provide extremely high performance access to a large number of local models.
• llm-ollama adds support for local models run using Ollama.
• llm-llamafile adds support for local models that are running locally using llamafile.
• llm-mlc can run local models released by the MLC project, including models that can take advantage of the GPU on Apple Silicon M1/M2 devices.
• llm-gpt4all adds support for various models released by the GPT4All project that are optimized to run locally on your own machine. These models include versions of Vicuna, Orca, Falcon and MPT - here's a full list of models.
• llm-mpt30b adds support for the MPT-30B local model.

These plugins can be used to interact with remotely hosted models via their API:

• llm-mistral adds support for Mistral AI's language and embedding models.
• llm-gemini adds support for Google's Gemini models.
• llm-anthropic supports Anthropic's Claude 3 family, 3.5 Sonnet and beyond.
• llm-command-r supports Cohere's Command R and Command R Plus API models.
• llm-reka supports the Reka family of models via their API.
• llm-perplexity by Alexandru Geana supports the Perplexity Labs API models, including llama-3-sonar-large-32k-online which can search for things online and llama-3-70b-instruct.
• llm-groq by Moritz Angermann provides access to fast models hosted by Groq.
• llm-grok by Benedikt Hiepler providing access to Grok model using the xAI API Grok.
• llm-anyscale-endpoints supports models hosted on the Anyscale Endpoints platform, including Llama 2 70B.
• llm-replicate adds support for remote models hosted on Replicate, including Llama 2 from Meta AI.
• llm-fireworks supports models hosted by Fireworks AI.
• llm-openrouter provides access to models hosted on OpenRouter.
• llm-cohere by Alistair Shepherd provides cohere-generate and cohere-summarize API models, powered by Cohere.
• llm-bedrock adds support for Nova by Amazon via Amazon Bedrock.
• llm-bedrock-anthropic by Sean Blakey adds support for Claude and Claude Instant by Anthropic via Amazon Bedrock.
• llm-bedrock-meta by Fabian Labat adds support for Llama 2 and Llama 3 by Meta via Amazon Bedrock.
• llm-together adds support for the Together AI extensive family of hosted openly licensed models.
• llm-deepseek adds support for the DeepSeek's DeepSeek-Chat and DeepSeek-Coder models.
• llm-lambda-labs provides access to models hosted by Lambda Labs, including the Nous Hermes 3 series.
• llm-venice provides access to uncensored models hosted by privacy-focused Venice AI, including Llama 3.1 405B.

If an API model host provides an OpenAI-compatible API you can also configure LLM to talk to it without needing an extra plugin.

The following plugins add new tools that can be used by models:

• llm-tools-simpleeval implements simple expression support for things like mathematics.
• llm-tools-quickjs provides access to a sandboxed QuickJS JavaScript interpreter, allowing LLMs to run JavaScript code. The environment persists between calls so the model can set variables and build functions and reuse them later on.
• llm-tools-sqlite can run read-only SQL queries against local SQLite databases.
• llm-tools-datasette can run SQL queries against a remote Datasette instance.
• llm-tools-exa by Dan Turkel can perform web searches and question-answering using exa.ai.
• llm-tools-rag by Dan Turkel can perform searches over your LLM embedding collections for simple RAG.

LLM 0.24 introduced support for plugins that define -f prefix:value or -t prefix:value custom loaders for fragments and templates.

• llm-video-frames uses ffmpeg to turn a video into a sequence of JPEG frames suitable for feeding into a vision model that doesn't support video inputs: llm -f video-frames:video.mp4 'describe the key scenes in this video'.
• llm-templates-github supports loading templates shared on GitHub, e.g. llm -t gh:simonw/pelican-svg.
• llm-templates-fabric provides access to the Fabric collection of prompts: cat setup.py | llm -t fabric:explain_code.
• llm-fragments-github can load entire GitHub repositories in a single operation: llm -f github:simonw/files-to-prompt 'explain this code'. It can also fetch issue threads as Markdown using llm -f issue:https://github.com/simonw/llm-fragments-github/issues/3.
• llm-hacker-news imports conversations from Hacker News as fragments: llm -f hn:43615912 'summary with illustrative direct quotes'.
• llm-fragments-pypi loads PyPI packages' description and metadata as fragments: llm -f pypi:ruff "What flake8 plugins does ruff re-implement?".
• llm-fragments-pdf by Dan Turkel converts PDFs to markdown with PyMuPDF4LLM to use as fragments: llm -f pdf:something.pdf "what's this about?".
• llm-fragments-site-text by Dan Turkel converts websites to markdown with Trafilatura to use as fragments: llm -f site:https://example.com "summarize this".
• llm-fragments-reader runs a URL theough the Jina Reader API: llm -f 'reader:https://simonwillison.net/tags/jina/' summary.

Embedding models are models that can be used to generate and store embedding vectors for text.

• llm-sentence-transformers adds support for embeddings using the sentence-transformers library, which provides access to a wide range of embedding models.
• llm-clip provides the CLIP model, which can be used to embed images and text in the same vector space, enabling text search against images. See Build an image search engine with llm-clip for more on this plugin.
• llm-embed-jina provides Jina AI's 8K text embedding models.
• llm-embed-onnx provides seven embedding models that can be executed using the ONNX model framework.

• llm-cmd accepts a prompt for a shell command, runs that prompt and populates the result in your shell so you can review it, edit it and then hit <enter> to execute or ctrl+c to cancel.
• llm-cmd-comp provides a key binding for your shell that will launch a chat to build the command. When ready, hit <enter> and it will go right back into your shell command line, so you can run it.
• llm-python adds a llm python command for running a Python interpreter in the same virtual environment as LLM. This is useful for debugging, and also provides a convenient way to interact with the LLM Python API if you installed LLM using Homebrew or pipx.
• llm-cluster adds a llm cluster command for calculating clusters for a collection of embeddings. Calculated clusters can then be passed to a Large Language Model to generate a summary description.
• llm-jq lets you pipe in JSON data and a prompt describing a jq program, then executes the generated program against the JSON.

• llm-markov adds a simple model that generates output using a Markov chain. This example is used in the tutorial Writing a plugin to support a new model.

Plugins use plugin hooks to customize LLM's behavior. These hooks are powered by the Pluggy plugin system.

Each plugin can implement one or more hooks using the @hookimpl decorator against one of the hook function names described on this page.

LLM imitates the Datasette plugin system. The Datasette plugin documentation describes how plugins work.

This hook adds new commands to the llm CLI tool - for example llm extra-command.

This example plugin adds a new hello-world command that prints "Hello world!":

from llm import hookimpl
import click

@hookimpl
def register_commands(cli):
    @cli.command(name="hello-world")
    def hello_world():
        "Print hello world"
        click.echo("Hello world!")

This new command will be added to llm --help and can be run using llm hello-world.

This hook can be used to register one or more additional models.

import llm

@llm.hookimpl
def register_models(register):
    register(HelloWorld())

class HelloWorld(llm.Model):
    model_id = "helloworld"

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response):
        return ["hello world"]

If your model includes an async version, you can register that too:

class AsyncHelloWorld(llm.AsyncModel):
    model_id = "helloworld"

    async def execute(self, prompt, stream, response):
        return ["hello world"]

@llm.hookimpl
def register_models(register):
    register(HelloWorld(), AsyncHelloWorld(), aliases=("hw",))

This demonstrates how to register a model with both sync and async versions, and how to specify an alias for that model.

The model plugin tutorial describes how to use this hook in detail. Asynchronous models are described here.

This hook can be used to register one or more additional embedding models, as described in Writing plugins to add new embedding models.

import llm

@llm.hookimpl
def register_embedding_models(register):
    register(HelloWorld())

class HelloWorld(llm.EmbeddingModel):
    model_id = "helloworld"

    def embed_batch(self, items):
        return [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]

This hook can register one or more tool functions for use with LLM. See the tools documentation for more details.

This example registers two tools: upper and count_character_in_word.

import llm

def upper(text: str) -> str:
    """Convert text to uppercase."""
    return text.upper()

def count_char(text: str, character: str) -> int:
    """Count the number of occurrences of a character in a word."""
    return text.count(character)

@llm.hookimpl
def register_tools(register):
    register(upper)
    # Here the name= argument is used to specify a different name for the tool:
    register(count_char, name="count_character_in_word")

Tools can also be implemented as classes, as described in Toolbox classes in the Python API documentation.

You can register classes like the Memory example from here by passing the class (not an instance of the class) to register():

import llm

class Memory(llm.Toolbox):
    # Copy implementation from the Python API documentation

@llm.hookimpl
def register_tools(register):
    register(Memory)

Once installed, this tool can be used like so:

llm chat -T Memory

If a tool name starts with a capital letter it is assumed to be a toolbox class, not a regular tool function.

Here's an example session with the Memory tool:

Chatting with gpt-4.1-mini
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt
Type '!fragment <my_fragment> [<another_fragment> ...]' to insert one or more fragments
> Remember my name is Henry

Tool call: Memory_set({'key': 'user_name', 'value': 'Henry'})
  null

Got it, Henry! I'll remember your name. How can I assist you today?
> what keys are there?

Tool call: Memory_keys({})
  [
    "user_name"
  ]

Currently, there is one key stored: "user_name". Would you like to add or retrieve any information?
> read it

Tool call: Memory_get({'key': 'user_name'})
  Henry

The value stored under the key "user_name" is Henry. Is there anything else you'd like to do?
> add Barrett to it

Tool call: Memory_append({'key': 'user_name', 'value': 'Barrett'})
  null

I have added "Barrett" to the key "user_name". If you want, I can now show you the updated value.
> show value

Tool call: Memory_get({'key': 'user_name'})
  Henry
  Barrett

The value stored under the key "user_name" is now:
Henry
Barrett

Is there anything else you would like to do?

Plugins can register new template loaders using the register_template_loaders hook.

Template loaders work with the llm -t prefix:name syntax. The prefix specifies the loader, then the registered loader function is called with the name as an argument. The loader function should return an llm.Template() object.

This example plugin registers my-prefix as a new template loader. Once installed it can be used like this:

llm -t my-prefix:my-template

Here's the Python code:

import llm

@llm.hookimpl
def register_template_loaders(register):
    register("my-prefix", my_template_loader)

def my_template_loader(template_path: str) -> llm.Template:
    """
    Documentation for the template loader goes here. It will be displayed
    when users run the 'llm templates loaders' command.
    """
    try:
        # Your logic to fetch the template content
        # This is just an example:
        prompt = "This is a sample prompt for {}".format(template_path)
        system = "You are an assistant specialized in {}".format(template_path)

        # Return a Template object with the required fields
        return llm.Template(
            name=template_path,
            prompt=prompt,
            system=system,
        )
    except Exception as e:
        # Raise a ValueError with a clear message if the template cannot be found
        raise ValueError(f"Template '{template_path}' could not be loaded: {str(e)}")

The llm.Template class has the following constructor:

class llm.Template(*, name: str, prompt: str | None = None, system: str | None = None, attachments: List[str] | None = None, attachment_types: List[AttachmentType] | None = None, model: str | None = None, defaults: Dict[str, Any] | None = None, options: Dict[str, Any] | None = None, extract: bool | None = None, extract_last: bool | None = None, schema_object: dict | None = None, fragments: List[str] | None = None, system_fragments: List[str] | None = None, tools: List[str] | None = None, functions: str | None = None)

The loader function should raise a ValueError if the template cannot be found or loaded correctly, providing a clear error message.

Note that functions: provided by templates using this plugin hook will not be made available, to avoid the risk of plugin hooks that load templates from remote sources introducing arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.

Plugins can register new fragment loaders using the register_template_loaders hook. These can then be used with the llm -f prefix:argument syntax.

Fragment loader plugins differ from template loader plugins in that you can stack more than one fragment loader call together in the same prompt.

A fragment loader can return one or more string fragments or attachments, or a mixture of the two. The fragments will be concatenated together into the prompt string, while any attachments will be added to the list of attachments to be sent to the model.

The prefix specifies the loader. The argument will be passed to that registered callback..

The callback works in a very similar way to template loaders, but returns either a single llm.Fragment, a list of llm.Fragment objects, a single llm.Attachment, or a list that can mix llm.Attachment and llm.Fragment objects.

The llm.Fragment constructor takes a required string argument (the content of the fragment) and an optional second source argument, which is a string that may be displayed as debug information. For files this is a path and for URLs it is a URL. Your plugin can use anything you like for the source value.

See the Python API documentation for attachments for details of the llm.Attachment class.

Here is some example code:

import llm

@llm.hookimpl
def register_fragment_loaders(register):
    register("my-fragments", my_fragment_loader)


def my_fragment_loader(argument: str) -> llm.Fragment:
    """
    Documentation for the fragment loader goes here. It will be displayed
    when users run the 'llm fragments loaders' command.
    """
    try:
        fragment = "Fragment content for {}".format(argument)
        source = "my-fragments:{}".format(argument)
        return llm.Fragment(fragment, source)
    except Exception as ex:
        # Raise a ValueError with a clear message if the fragment cannot be loaded
        raise ValueError(
            f"Fragment 'my-fragments:{argument}' could not be loaded: {str(ex)}"
        )

# Or for the case where you want to return multiple fragments and attachments:
def my_fragment_loader(argument: str) -> list[llm.Fragment]:
    "Docs go here."
    return [
        llm.Fragment("Fragment 1 content", "my-fragments:{argument}"),
        llm.Fragment("Fragment 2 content", "my-fragments:{argument}"),
        llm.Attachment(path="/path/to/image.png"),
    ]

A plugin like this one can be called like so:

llm -f my-fragments:argument

If multiple fragments are returned they will be used as if the user passed multiple -f X arguments to the command.

Multiple fragments are particularly useful for things like plugins that return every file in a directory. If these were concatenated together by the plugin, a change to a single file would invalidate the de-duplicatino cache for that whole fragment. Giving each file its own fragment means we can avoid storing multiple copies of that full collection if only a single file has changed.

This tutorial will walk you through developing a new plugin for LLM that adds support for a new Large Language Model.

We will be developing a plugin that implements a simple Markov chain to generate words based on an input string. Markov chains are not technically large language models, but they provide a useful exercise for demonstrating how the LLM tool can be extended through plugins.

First create a new directory with the name of your plugin - it should be called something like llm-markov.

mkdir llm-markov
cd llm-markov

In that directory create a file called llm_markov.py containing this:

import llm

@llm.hookimpl
def register_models(register):
    register(Markov())

class Markov(llm.Model):
    model_id = "markov"

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation):
        return ["hello world"]

The def register_models() function here is called by the plugin system (thanks to the @hookimpl decorator). It uses the register() function passed to it to register an instance of the new model.

The Markov class implements the model. It sets a model_id - an identifier that can be passed to llm -m in order to identify the model to be executed.

The logic for executing the model goes in the execute() method. We'll extend this to do something more useful in a later step.

Next, create a pyproject.toml file. This is necessary to tell LLM how to load your plugin:

[project]
name = "llm-markov"
version = "0.1"

[project.entry-points.llm]
markov = "llm_markov"

This is the simplest possible configuration. It defines a plugin name and provides an entry point for llm telling it how to load the plugin.

If you are comfortable with Python virtual environments you can create one now for your project, activate it and run pip install llm before the next step.

If you aren't familiar with virtual environments, don't worry: you can develop plugins without them. You'll need to have LLM installed using Homebrew or pipx or one of the other installation options.

Having created a directory with a pyproject.toml file and an llm_markov.py file, you can install your plugin into LLM by running this from inside your llm-markov directory:

llm install -e .

The -e stands for "editable" - it means you'll be able to make further changes to the llm_markov.py file that will be reflected without you having to reinstall the plugin.

The . means the current directory. You can also install editable plugins by passing a path to their directory this:

llm install -e path/to/llm-markov

To confirm that your plugin has installed correctly, run this command:

llm plugins

The output should look like this:

[
  {
    "name": "llm-markov",
    "hooks": [
      "register_models"
    ],
    "version": "0.1"
  },
  {
    "name": "llm.default_plugins.openai_models",
    "hooks": [
      "register_commands",
      "register_models"
    ]
  }
]

This command lists default plugins that are included with LLM as well as new plugins that have been installed.

Now let's try the plugin by running a prompt through it:

llm -m markov "the cat sat on the mat"

It outputs:

hello world

Next, we'll make it execute and return the results of a Markov chain.

Markov chains can be thought of as the simplest possible example of a generative language model. They work by building an index of words that have been seen following other words.

Here's what that index looks like for the phrase "the cat sat on the mat"

{
  "the": ["cat", "mat"],
  "cat": ["sat"],
  "sat": ["on"],
  "on": ["the"]
}

Here's a Python function that builds that data structure from a text input:

def build_markov_table(text):
    words = text.split()
    transitions = {}
    # Loop through all but the last word
    for i in range(len(words) - 1):
        word = words[i]
        next_word = words[i + 1]
        transitions.setdefault(word, []).append(next_word)
    return transitions

We can try that out by pasting it into the interactive Python interpreter and running this:

>>> transitions = build_markov_table("the cat sat on the mat")
>>> transitions
{'the': ['cat', 'mat'], 'cat': ['sat'], 'sat': ['on'], 'on': ['the']}

To execute the model, we start with a word. We look at the options for words that might come next and pick one of those at random. Then we repeat that process until we have produced the desired number of output words.

Some words might not have any following words from our training sentence. For our implementation we will fall back on picking a random word from our collection.

We will implement this as a Python generator, using the yield keyword to produce each token:

def generate(transitions, length, start_word=None):
    all_words = list(transitions.keys())
    next_word = start_word or random.choice(all_words)
    for i in range(length):
        yield next_word
        options = transitions.get(next_word) or all_words
        next_word = random.choice(options)

If you aren't familiar with generators, the above code could also be implemented like this - creating a Python list and returning it at the end of the function:

def generate_list(transitions, length, start_word=None):
    all_words = list(transitions.keys())
    next_word = start_word or random.choice(all_words)
    output = []
    for i in range(length):
        output.append(next_word)
        options = transitions.get(next_word) or all_words
        next_word = random.choice(options)
    return output

You can try out the generate() function like this:

lookup = build_markov_table("the cat sat on the mat")
for word in generate(transitions, 20):
    print(word)

Or you can generate a full string sentence with it like this:

sentence = " ".join(generate(transitions, 20))

Our execute() method from earlier currently returns the list ["hello world"].

Update that to use our new Markov chain generator instead. Here's the full text of the new llm_markov.py file:

import llm
import random

@llm.hookimpl
def register_models(register):
    register(Markov())

def build_markov_table(text):
    words = text.split()
    transitions = {}
    # Loop through all but the last word
    for i in range(len(words) - 1):
        word = words[i]
        next_word = words[i + 1]
        transitions.setdefault(word, []).append(next_word)
    return transitions

def generate(transitions, length, start_word=None):
    all_words = list(transitions.keys())
    next_word = start_word or random.choice(all_words)
    for i in range(length):
        yield next_word
        options = transitions.get(next_word) or all_words
        next_word = random.choice(options)

class Markov(llm.Model):
    model_id = "markov"

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation):
        text = prompt.prompt
        transitions = build_markov_table(text)
        for word in generate(transitions, 20):
            yield word + ' '

The execute() method can access the text prompt that the user provided using prompt.prompt - prompt is a Prompt object that might include other more advanced input details as well.

Now when you run this you should see the output of the Markov chain!

llm -m markov "the cat sat on the mat"

the mat the cat sat on the cat sat on the mat cat sat on the mat cat sat on

The full signature of the execute() method is:

def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation):

The prompt argument is a Prompt object that contains the text that the user provided, the system prompt and the provided options.

stream is a boolean that says if the model is being run in streaming mode.

response is the Response object that is being created by the model. This is provided so you can write additional information to response.response_json, which may be logged to the database.

conversation is the Conversation that the prompt is a part of - or None if no conversation was provided. Some models may use conversation.responses to access previous prompts and responses in the conversation and use them to construct a call to the LLM that includes previous context.

The prompt and the response will be logged to a SQLite database automatically by LLM. You can see the single most recent addition to the logs using:

llm logs -n 1

The output should look something like this:

[
  {
    "id": "01h52s4yez2bd1qk2deq49wk8h",
    "model": "markov",
    "prompt": "the cat sat on the mat",
    "system": null,
    "prompt_json": null,
    "options_json": {},
    "response": "on the cat sat on the cat sat on the mat cat sat on the cat sat on the cat ",
    "response_json": null,
    "conversation_id": "01h52s4yey7zc5rjmczy3ft75g",
    "duration_ms": 0,
    "datetime_utc": "2023-07-11T15:29:34.685868",
    "conversation_name": "the cat sat on the mat",
    "conversation_model": "markov"
  }
]

Plugins can log additional information to the database by assigning a dictionary to the response.response_json property during the execute() method.

Here's how to include that full transitions table in the response_json in the log:

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation):
        text = self.prompt.prompt
        transitions = build_markov_table(text)
        for word in generate(transitions, 20):
            yield word + ' '
        response.response_json = {"transitions": transitions}

Now when you run the logs command you'll see that too:

llm logs -n 1

[
  {
    "id": 623,
    "model": "markov",
    "prompt": "the cat sat on the mat",
    "system": null,
    "prompt_json": null,
    "options_json": {},
    "response": "on the mat the cat sat on the cat sat on the mat sat on the cat sat on the ",
    "response_json": {
      "transitions": {
        "the": [
          "cat",
          "mat"
        ],
        "cat": [
          "sat"
        ],
        "sat": [
          "on"
        ],
        "on": [
          "the"
        ]
      }
    },
    "reply_to_id": null,
    "chat_id": null,
    "duration_ms": 0,
    "datetime_utc": "2023-07-06T01:34:45.376637"
  }
]

In this particular case this isn't a great idea here though: the transitions table is duplicate information, since it can be reproduced from the input data - and it can get really large for longer prompts.

LLM models can take options. For large language models these can be things like temperature or top_k.

Options are passed using the -o/--option command line parameters, for example:

llm -m gpt4 "ten pet pelican names" -o temperature 1.5

We're going to add two options to our Markov chain model:

• length: Number of words to generate
• delay: a floating point number of Delay in between output token

The delay token will let us simulate a streaming language model, where tokens take time to generate and are returned by the execute() function as they become ready.

Options are defined using an inner class on the model, called Options. It should extend the llm.Options class.

First, add this import to the top of your llm_markov.py file:

from typing import Optional

Then add this Options class to your model:

class Markov(Model):
    model_id = "markov"

    class Options(llm.Options):
        length: Optional[int] = None
        delay: Optional[float] = None

Let's add extra validation rules to our options. Length must be at least 2. Duration must be between 0 and 10.

The Options class uses Pydantic 2, which can support all sorts of advanced validation rules.

We can also add inline documentation, which can then be displayed by the llm models --options command.

Add these imports to the top of llm_markov.py:

from pydantic import field_validator, Field

We can now add Pydantic field validators for our two new rules, plus inline documentation:

    class Options(llm.Options):
        length: Optional[int] = Field(
            description="Number of words to generate",
            default=None
        )
        delay: Optional[float] = Field(
            description="Seconds to delay between each token",
            default=None
        )

        @field_validator("length")
        def validate_length(cls, length):
            if length is None:
                return None
            if length < 2:
                raise ValueError("length must be >= 2")
            return length

        @field_validator("delay")
        def validate_delay(cls, delay):
            if delay is None:
                return None
            if not 0 <= delay <= 10:
                raise ValueError("delay must be between 0 and 10")
            return delay

Lets test our options validation:

llm -m markov "the cat sat on the mat" -o length -1

Error: length
  Value error, length must be >= 2

Next, we will modify our execute() method to handle those options. Add this to the beginning of llm_markov.py:

import time

Then replace the execute() method with this one:

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation):
        text = prompt.prompt
        transitions = build_markov_table(text)
        length = prompt.options.length or 20
        for word in generate(transitions, length):
            yield word + ' '
            if prompt.options.delay:
                time.sleep(prompt.options.delay)

Add can_stream = True to the top of the Markov model class, on the line below `model_id = "markov". This tells LLM that the model is able to stream content to the console.

The full llm_markov.py file should now look like this:

import llm
import random
import time
from typing import Optional
from pydantic import field_validator, Field


@llm.hookimpl
def register_models(register):
    register(Markov())


def build_markov_table(text):
    words = text.split()
    transitions = {}
    # Loop through all but the last word
    for i in range(len(words) - 1):
        word = words[i]
        next_word = words[i + 1]
        transitions.setdefault(word, []).append(next_word)
    return transitions


def generate(transitions, length, start_word=None):
    all_words = list(transitions.keys())
    next_word = start_word or random.choice(all_words)
    for i in range(length):
        yield next_word
        options = transitions.get(next_word) or all_words
        next_word = random.choice(options)


class Markov(llm.Model):
    model_id = "markov"
    can_stream = True

    class Options(llm.Options):
        length: Optional[int] = Field(
            description="Number of words to generate", default=None
        )
        delay: Optional[float] = Field(
            description="Seconds to delay between each token", default=None
        )

        @field_validator("length")
        def validate_length(cls, length):
            if length is None:
                return None
            if length < 2:
                raise ValueError("length must be >= 2")
            return length

        @field_validator("delay")
        def validate_delay(cls, delay):
            if delay is None:
                return None
            if not 0 <= delay <= 10:
                raise ValueError("delay must be between 0 and 10")
            return delay

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation):
        text = prompt.prompt
        transitions = build_markov_table(text)
        length = prompt.options.length or 20
        for word in generate(transitions, length):
            yield word + " "
            if prompt.options.delay:
                time.sleep(prompt.options.delay)

Now we can request a 20 word completion with a 0.1s delay between tokens like this:

llm -m markov "the cat sat on the mat" \
  -o length 20 -o delay 0.1

LLM provides a --no-stream option users can use to turn off streaming. Using that option causes LLM to gather the response from the stream and then return it to the console in one block. You can try that like this:

llm -m markov "the cat sat on the mat" \
  -o length 20 -o delay 0.1 --no-stream

In this case it will still delay for 2s total while it gathers the tokens, then output them all at once.

That --no-stream option causes the stream argument passed to execute() to be false. Your execute() method can then behave differently depending on whether it is streaming or not.

Options are also logged to the database. You can see those here:

llm logs -n 1

[
  {
    "id": 636,
    "model": "markov",
    "prompt": "the cat sat on the mat",
    "system": null,
    "prompt_json": null,
    "options_json": {
      "length": 20,
      "delay": 0.1
    },
    "response": "the mat on the mat on the cat sat on the mat sat on the mat cat sat on the ",
    "response_json": null,
    "reply_to_id": null,
    "chat_id": null,
    "duration_ms": 2063,
    "datetime_utc": "2023-07-07T03:02:28.232970"
  }
]

There are many different options for distributing your new plugin so other people can try it out.

You can create a downloadable wheel or .zip or .tar.gz files, or share the plugin through GitHub Gists or repositories.

You can also publish your plugin to PyPI, the Python Package Index.

The easiest option is to produce a distributable package is to use the build command. First, install the build package by running this:

python -m pip install build

Then run build in your plugin directory to create the packages:

python -m build

This will create two files: dist/llm-markov-0.1.tar.gz and dist/llm-markov-0.1-py3-none-any.whl.

Either of these files can be used to install the plugin:

llm install dist/llm_markov-0.1-py3-none-any.whl

If you host this file somewhere online other people will be able to install it using pip install against the URL to your package:

llm install 'https://.../llm_markov-0.1-py3-none-any.whl'

You can run the following command at any time to uninstall your plugin, which is useful for testing out different installation methods:

llm uninstall llm-markov -y

A neat quick option for distributing a simple plugin is to host it in a GitHub Gist. These are available for free with a GitHub account, and can be public or private. Gists can contain multiple files but don't support directory structures - which is OK, because our plugin is just two files, pyproject.toml and llm_markov.py.

Here's an example Gist I created for this tutorial:

https://gist.github.com/simonw/6e56d48dc2599bffba963cef0db27b6d

You can turn a Gist into an installable .zip URL by right-clicking on the "Download ZIP" button and selecting "Copy Link". Here's that link for my example Gist:

https://gist.github.com/simonw/6e56d48dc2599bffba963cef0db27b6d/archive/cc50c854414cb4deab3e3ab17e7e1e07d45cba0c.zip

The plugin can be installed using the llm install command like this:

llm install 'https://gist.github.com/simonw/6e56d48dc2599bffba963cef0db27b6d/archive/cc50c854414cb4deab3e3ab17e7e1e07d45cba0c.zip'

The same trick works for regular GitHub repositories as well: the "Download ZIP" button can be found by clicking the green "Code" button at the top of the repository. The URL which that provides can then be used to install the plugin that lives in that repository.

The Python Package Index (PyPI) is the official repository for Python packages. You can upload your plugin to PyPI and reserve a name for it - once you have done that, anyone will be able to install your plugin using llm install <name>.

Follow these instructions to publish a package to PyPI. The short version:

python -m pip install twine
python -m twine upload dist/*

You will need an account on PyPI, then you can enter your username and password - or create a token in the PyPI settings and use __token__ as the username and the token as the password.

Before uploading a package to PyPI it's a good idea to add documentation and expand pyproject.toml with additional metadata.

Create a README.md file in the root of your plugin directory with instructions about how to install, configure and use your plugin.

You can then replace pyproject.toml with something like this:

[project]
name = "llm-markov"
version = "0.1"
description = "Plugin for LLM adding a Markov chain generating model"
readme = "README.md"
authors = [{name = "Simon Willison"}]
license = {text = "Apache-2.0"}
classifiers = [
    "License :: OSI Approved :: Apache Software License"
]
dependencies = [
    "llm"
]
requires-python = ">3.7"

[project.urls]
Homepage = "https://github.com/simonw/llm-markov"
Changelog = "https://github.com/simonw/llm-markov/releases"
Issues = "https://github.com/simonw/llm-markov/issues"

[project.entry-points.llm]
markov = "llm_markov"

This will pull in your README to be displayed as part of your project's listing page on PyPI.

It adds llm as a dependency, ensuring it will be installed if someone tries to install your plugin package without it.

It adds some links to useful pages (you can drop the project.urls section if those links are not useful for your project).

You should drop a LICENSE file into the GitHub repository for your package as well. I like to use the Apache 2 license like this.

Sometimes you may make a change to your plugin that causes it to break, preventing llm from starting. For example you may see an error like this one:

$ llm 'hi'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
  File llm-markov/llm_markov.py", line 10
    register(Markov()):
                      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

You may find that you are unable to uninstall the plugin using llm uninstall llm-markov because the command itself fails with the same error.

Should this happen, you can uninstall the plugin after first disabling it using the LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS environment variable like this:

LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS='' llm uninstall llm-markov

The model plugin tutorial covers the basics of developing a plugin that adds support for a new model. This document covers more advanced topics.

Features to consider for your model plugin include:

• Accepting API keys using the standard mechanism that incorporates llm keys set, environment variables and support for passing an explicit key to the model.
• Including support for Async models that can be used with Python's asyncio library.
• Support for structured output using JSON schemas.
• Support for tools.
• Handling attachments (images, audio and more) for multi-modal models.
• Tracking token usage for models that charge by the token.

If your plugin depends on an expensive library such as PyTorch you should avoid importing that dependency (or a dependency that uses that dependency) at the top level of your module. Expensive imports in plugins mean that even simple commands like llm --help can take a long time to run.

Instead, move those imports to inside the methods that need them. Here's an example change to llm-sentence-transformers that shaved 1.8 seconds off the time it took to run llm --help!

Models that call out to API providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini usually require an API key.

LLM's API key management mechanism is described here.

If your plugin requires an API key you should subclass the llm.KeyModel class instead of the llm.Model class. Start your model definition like this:

import llm

class HostedModel(llm.KeyModel):
    needs_key = "hosted" # Required
    key_env_var = "HOSTED_API_KEY" # Optional

This tells LLM that your model requires an API key, which may be saved in the key registry under the key name hosted or might also be provided as the HOSTED_API_KEY environment variable.

Then when you define your execute() method it should take an extra key= parameter like this:

    def execute(self, prompt, stream, response, conversation, key=None):
        # key= here will be the API key to use

LLM will pass in the key from the environment variable, key registry or that has been passed to LLM as the --key command-line option or the model.prompt(..., key=) parameter.

Plugins can optionally provide an asynchronous version of their model, suitable for use with Python asyncio. This is particularly useful for remote models accessible by an HTTP API.

The async version of a model subclasses llm.AsyncModel instead of llm.Model. It must implement an async def execute() async generator method instead of def execute().

This example shows a subset of the OpenAI default plugin illustrating how this method might work:

from typing import AsyncGenerator
import llm

class MyAsyncModel(llm.AsyncModel):
    # This can duplicate the model_id of the sync model:
    model_id = "my-model-id"

    async def execute(
        self, prompt, stream, response, conversation=None
    ) -> AsyncGenerator[str, None]:
        if stream:
            completion = await client.chat.completions.create(
                model=self.model_id,
                messages=messages,
                stream=True,
            )
            async for chunk in completion:
                yield chunk.choices[0].delta.content
        else:
            completion = await client.chat.completions.create(
                model=self.model_name or self.model_id,
                messages=messages,
                stream=False,
            )
            if completion.choices[0].message.content is not None:
                yield completion.choices[0].message.content

If your model takes an API key you should instead subclass llm.AsyncKeyModel and have a key= parameter on your .execute() method:

class MyAsyncModel(llm.AsyncKeyModel):
    ...
    async def execute(
        self, prompt, stream, response, conversation=None, key=None
    ) -> AsyncGenerator[str, None]:

This async model instance should then be passed to the register() method in the register_models() plugin hook:

@hookimpl
def register_models(register):
    register(
        MyModel(), MyAsyncModel(), aliases=("my-model-aliases",)
    )

If your model supports structured output against a defined JSON schema you can implement support by first adding supports_schema = True to the class:

class MyModel(llm.KeyModel):
    ...
    support_schema = True

And then adding code to your .execute() method that checks for prompt.schema and, if it is present, uses that to prompt the model.

prompt.schema will always be a Python dictionary representing a JSON schema, even if the user passed in a Pydantic model class.

Check the llm-gemini and llm-anthropic plugins for example of this pattern in action.

Adding tools support involves several steps:

1. Add supports_tools = True to your model class.
2. If prompt.tools is populated, turn that list of llm.Tool objects into the correct format for your model.
3. Look out for requests to call tools in the responses from your model. Call response.add_tool_call(llm.ToolCall(...)) for each of those. This should work for streaming and non-streaming and async and non-async cases.
4. If your prompt has a prompt.tool_results list, pass the information from those llm.ToolResult objects to your model.
5. Include prompt.tools and prompt.tool_results and tool calls from response.tool_calls_or_raise() in the conversation history constructed by your plugin.
6. Make sure your code is OK with prompts that do not have prompt.prompt set to a value, since they may be carrying exclusively the results of a tool call.

This commit to llm-gemini implementing tools helps demonstrate what this looks like for a real plugin.

Here are the relevant dataclasses:

class llm.Tool(name: str, description: str | None = None, input_schema: Dict = <factory>, implementation: Callable | None = None, plugin: str | None = None)

class llm.ToolCall(name: str, arguments: dict, tool_call_id: str | None = None)

class llm.ToolResult(name: str, output: str, attachments: List[llm.models.Attachment] = <factory>, tool_call_id: str | None = None, instance: llm.models.Toolbox | None = None, exception: Exception | None = None)

Models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google's Gemini 1.5 are multi-modal: they accept input in the form of images and maybe even audio, video and other formats.

LLM calls these attachments. Models can specify the types of attachments they accept and then implement special code in the .execute() method to handle them.

See the Python attachments documentation for details on using attachments in the Python API.

A Model subclass can list the types of attachments it accepts by defining a attachment_types class attribute:

class NewModel(llm.Model):
    model_id = "new-model"
    attachment_types = {
        "image/png",
        "image/jpeg",
        "image/webp",
        "image/gif",
    }

These content types are detected when an attachment is passed to LLM using llm -a filename, or can be specified by the user using the --attachment-type filename image/png option.

Note: MP3 files will have their attachment type detected as audio/mpeg, not audio/mp3.

LLM will use the attachment_types attribute to validate that provided attachments should be accepted before passing them to the model.

The prompt object passed to the execute() method will have an attachments attribute containing a list of Attachment objects provided by the user.

An Attachment instance has the following properties:

• url (str): The URL of the attachment, if it was provided as a URL
• path (str): The resolved file path of the attachment, if it was provided as a file
• type (str): The content type of the attachment, if it was provided
• content (bytes): The binary content of the attachment, if it was provided

Generally only one of url, path or content will be set.

You should usually access the type and the content through one of these methods:

• attachment.resolve_type() -> str: Returns the type if it is available, otherwise attempts to guess the type by looking at the first few bytes of content
• attachment.content_bytes() -> bytes: Returns the binary content, which it may need to read from a file or fetch from a URL
• attachment.base64_content() -> str: Returns that content as a base64-encoded string

A id() method returns a database ID for this content, which is either a SHA256 hash of the binary content or, in the case of attachments hosted at an external URL, a hash of {"url": url} instead. This is an implementation detail which you should not need to access directly.

Note that it's possible for a prompt with an attachments to not include a text prompt at all, in which case prompt.prompt will be None.

Here's how the OpenAI plugin handles attachments, including the case where no prompt.prompt was provided:

if not prompt.attachments:
    messages.append({"role": "user", "content": prompt.prompt})
else:
    attachment_message = []
    if prompt.prompt:
        attachment_message.append({"type": "text", "text": prompt.prompt})
    for attachment in prompt.attachments:
        attachment_message.append(_attachment(attachment))
    messages.append({"role": "user", "content": attachment_message})


# And the code for creating the attachment message
def _attachment(attachment):
    url = attachment.url
    base64_content = ""
    if not url or attachment.resolve_type().startswith("audio/"):
        base64_content = attachment.base64_content()
        url = f"data:{attachment.resolve_type()};base64,{base64_content}"
    if attachment.resolve_type().startswith("image/"):
        return {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": url}}
    else:
        format_ = "wav" if attachment.resolve_type() == "audio/wav" else "mp3"
        return {
            "type": "input_audio",
            "input_audio": {
                "data": base64_content,
                "format": format_,
            },
        }

As you can see, it uses attachment.url if that is available and otherwise falls back to using the base64_content() method to embed the image directly in the JSON sent to the API. For the OpenAI API audio attachments are always included as base64-encoded strings.

Models that implement the ability to continue a conversation can reconstruct the previous message JSON using the response.attachments attribute.

Here's how the OpenAI plugin does that:

for prev_response in conversation.responses:
    if prev_response.attachments:
        attachment_message = []
        if prev_response.prompt.prompt:
            attachment_message.append(
                {"type": "text", "text": prev_response.prompt.prompt}
            )
        for attachment in prev_response.attachments:
            attachment_message.append(_attachment(attachment))
        messages.append({"role": "user", "content": attachment_message})
    else:
        messages.append(
            {"role": "user", "content": prev_response.prompt.prompt}
        )
    messages.append({"role": "assistant", "content": prev_response.text_or_raise()})

The response.text_or_raise() method used there will return the text from the response or raise a ValueError exception if the response is an AsyncResponse instance that has not yet been fully resolved.

This is a slightly weird hack to work around the common need to share logic for building up the messages list across both sync and async models.

Models that charge by the token should track the number of tokens used by each prompt. The response.set_usage() method can be used to record the number of tokens used by a response - these will then be made available through the Python API and logged to the SQLite database for command-line users.

response here is the response object that is passed to .execute() as an argument.

Call response.set_usage() at the end of your .execute() method. It accepts keyword arguments input=, output= and details= - all three are optional. input and output should be integers, and details should be a dictionary that provides additional information beyond the input and output token counts.

This example logs 15 input tokens, 340 output tokens and notes that 37 tokens were cached:

response.set_usage(input=15, output=340, details={"cached": 37})

In some cases the model ID that the user requested may not be the exact model that is executed. Many providers have a model-latest alias which may execute different models over time.

If those APIs return the real model ID that was used, your plugin can record that in the resources.resolved_model column in the logs by calling this method and passing the string representing the resolved, final model ID:

response.set_resolved_model(resolved_model_id)

This string will be recorded in the database and shown in the output of llm logs and llm logs --json.

While working on a plugin it can be useful to request that errors are raised instead of being caught and logged, so you can access them from the Python debugger.

Set the LLM_RAISE_ERRORS environment variable to enable this behavior, then run llm like this:

LLM_RAISE_ERRORS=1 python -i -m llm ...

The -i option means Python will drop into an interactive shell if an error occurs. You can then open a debugger at the most recent error using:

import pdb; pdb.pm()

LLM provides some utility functions that may be useful to plugins.

This method can be used to look up secrets that users have stored using the llm keys set command. If your plugin needs to access an API key or other secret this can be a convenient way to provide that.

This returns either a string containing the key or None if the key could not be resolved.

Use the alias="name" option to retrieve the key set with that alias:

github_key = llm.get_key(alias="github")

You can also add env="ENV_VAR" to fall back to looking in that environment variable if the key has not been configured:

github_key = llm.get_key(alias="github", env="GITHUB_TOKEN")

In some cases you may allow users to provide a key as input, where they could input either the key itself or specify an alias to lookup in keys.json. Use the input= parameter for that:

github_key = llm.get_key(input=input_from_user, alias="github", env="GITHUB_TOKEN")

An previous version of function used positional arguments in a confusing order. These are still supported but the new keyword arguments are recommended as a better way to use llm.get_key() going forward.

LLM stores various pieces of logging and configuration data in a directory on the user's machine.

On macOS this directory is ~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm, but this will differ on other operating systems.

The llm.user_dir() function returns the path to this directory as a pathlib.Path object, after creating that directory if it does not yet exist.

Plugins can use this to store their own data in a subdirectory of this directory.

import llm
user_dir = llm.user_dir()
plugin_dir = data_path = user_dir / "my-plugin"
plugin_dir.mkdir(exist_ok=True)
data_path = plugin_dir / "plugin-data.db"

If your model encounters an error that should be reported to the user you can raise this exception. For example:

import llm

raise ModelError("MPT model not installed - try running 'llm mpt30b download'")

This will be caught by the CLI layer and displayed to the user as an error message.

When writing tests for a model it can be useful to generate fake response objects, for example in this test from llm-mpt30b:

def test_build_prompt_conversation():
    model = llm.get_model("mpt")
    conversation = model.conversation()
    conversation.responses = [
        llm.Response.fake(model, "prompt 1", "system 1", "response 1"),
        llm.Response.fake(model, "prompt 2", None, "response 2"),
        llm.Response.fake(model, "prompt 3", None, "response 3"),
    ]
    lines = model.build_prompt(llm.Prompt("prompt 4", model), conversation)
    assert lines == [
        "<|im_start|>system\system 1<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>user\nprompt 1<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>assistant\nresponse 1<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>user\nprompt 2<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>assistant\nresponse 2<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>user\nprompt 3<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>assistant\nresponse 3<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>user\nprompt 4<|im_end|>\n",
        "<|im_start|>assistant\n",
    ]

The signature of llm.Response.fake() is:

def fake(cls, model: Model, prompt: str, system: str, response: str):

LLM provides a Python API for executing prompts, in addition to the command-line interface.

Understanding this API is also important for writing Plugins.

To run a prompt against the gpt-4o-mini model, run this:

import llm

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
# key= is optional, you can configure the key in other ways
response = model.prompt(
    "Five surprising names for a pet pelican",
    key="sk-..."
)
print(response.text())

Note that the prompt will not be evaluated until you call that response.text() method - a form of lazy loading.

If you inspect the response before it has been evaluated it will look like this:

<Response prompt='Your prompt' text='... not yet done ...'>

The llm.get_model() function accepts model IDs or aliases. You can also omit it to use the currently configured default model, which is gpt-4o-mini if you have not changed the default.

In this example the key is set by Python code. You can also provide the key using the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable, or use the llm keys set openai command to store it in a keys.json file, see API key management.

The __str__() method of response also returns the text of the response, so you can do this instead:

print(llm.get_model().prompt("Five surprising names for a pet pelican"))

You can run this command to see a list of available models and their aliases:

llm models

If you have set a OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable you can omit the model.key = line.

Calling llm.get_model() with an invalid model ID will raise a llm.UnknownModelError exception.

For models that accept a system prompt, pass it as system="...":

response = model.prompt(
    "Five surprising names for a pet pelican",
    system="Answer like GlaDOS"
)

Models that accept multi-modal input (images, audio, video etc) can be passed attachments using the attachments= keyword argument. This accepts a list of llm.Attachment() instances.

This example shows two attachments - one from a file path and one from a URL:

import llm

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
response = model.prompt(
    "Describe these images",
    attachments=[
        llm.Attachment(path="pelican.jpg"),
        llm.Attachment(url="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg"),
    ]
)

Use llm.Attachment(content=b"binary image content here") to pass binary content directly.

You can check which attachment types (if any) a model supports using the model.attachment_types set:

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
print(model.attachment_types)
# {'image/gif', 'image/png', 'image/jpeg', 'image/webp'}

if "image/jpeg" in model.attachment_types:
    # Use a JPEG attachment here
    ...

Tools are functions that can be executed by the model as part of a chain of responses.

You can define tools in Python code - with a docstring to describe what they do - and then pass them to the model.prompt() method using the tools= keyword argument. If the model decides to request a tool call the response.tool_calls() method show what the model wants to execute:

import llm

def upper(text: str) -> str:
    """Convert text to uppercase."""
    return text.upper()

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4.1-mini")
response = model.prompt("Convert panda to upper", tools=[upper])
tool_calls = response.tool_calls()
# [ToolCall(name='upper', arguments={'text': 'panda'}, tool_call_id='...')]

You can call response.execute_tool_calls() to execute those calls and get back the results:

tool_results = response.execute_tool_calls()
# [ToolResult(name='upper', output='PANDA', tool_call_id='...')]

You can use the model.chain() to pass the results of tool calls back to the model automatically as subsequent prompts:

chain_response = model.chain(
    "Convert panda to upper",
    tools=[upper],
)
print(chain_response.text())
# The word "panda" converted to uppercase is "PANDA".

You can also loop through the model.chain() response to get a stream of tokens, like this:

for chunk in model.chain(
    "Convert panda to upper",
    tools=[upper],
):
    print(chunk, end="", flush=True)

This will stream each of the chain of responses in turn as they are generated.

You can access the individual responses that make up the chain using chain.responses(). This can be iterated over as the chain executes like this:

chain = model.chain(
    "Convert panda to upper",
    tools=[upper],
)
for response in chain.responses():
    print(response.prompt)
    for chunk in response:
        print(chunk, end="", flush=True)

Pass a function to the before_call= parameter of model.chain() to have that called before every tool call is executed. You can raise llm.CancelToolCall() to cancel that tool call.

The method signature is def before_call(tool: Optional[llm.Tool], tool_call: llm.ToolCall) - that first tool argument can be None if the model requests a tool be executed that has not been provided in the tools= list.

Here's an example:

import llm
from typing import Optional

def upper(text: str) -> str:
    "Convert text to uppercase."
    return text.upper()

def before_call(tool: Optional[llm.Tool], tool_call: llm.ToolCall):
    print(f"About to call tool {tool.name} with arguments {tool_call.arguments}")
    if tool.name == "upper" and "bad" in repr(tool_call.arguments):
        raise llm.CancelToolCall("Not allowed to call upper on text containing 'bad'")

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4.1-mini")
response = model.chain(
    "Convert panda to upper and badger to upper",
    tools=[upper],
    before_call=before_call,
)
print(response.text())

If you raise llm.CancelToolCall in the before_call function the model will be informed that the tool call was cancelled.

The after_call= parameter can be used to run a logging function after each tool call has been executed. The method signature is def after_call(tool: llm.Tool, tool_call: llm.ToolCall, tool_result: llm.ToolResult). This continues the previous example:

def after_call(tool: llm.Tool, tool_call: llm.ToolCall, tool_result: llm.ToolResult):
    print(f"Tool {tool.name} called with arguments {tool_call.arguments} returned {tool_result.output}")

response = model.chain(
    "Convert panda to upper and badger to upper",
    tools=[upper],
    after_call=after_call,
)
print(response.text())

Tools can return attachments in addition to returning text. Attachments that are returned from a tool call will be passed to the model as attachments for the next prompt in the chain.

To return one or more attachments, return a llm.ToolOutput instance from your tool function. This can have an output= string and an attachments= list of llm.Attachment instances.

Here's an example:

import llm

def generate_image(prompt: str) -> llm.ToolOutput:
    """Generate an image based on the prompt."""
    image_content = generate_image_from_prompt(prompt)
    return llm.ToolOutput(
        output="Image generated successfully",
        attachments=[llm.Attachment(
            content=image_content,
            mimetype="image/png"
        )],
    )

Functions are useful for simple tools, but some tools may have more advanced needs. You can also define tools as a class (known as a "toolbox"), which provides the following advantages:

• Toolbox tools can bundle multiple tools together
• Toolbox tools can be configured, e.g. to give filesystem tools access to a specific directory
• Toolbox instances can persist shared state in between tool invocations

Toolboxes are classes that extend llm.Toolbox. Any methods that do not begin with an underscore will be exposed as tool functions.

This example sets up key/value memory storage that can be used by the model:

import llm

class Memory(llm.Toolbox):
    _memory = None

    def _get_memory(self):
        if self._memory is None:
            self._memory = {}
        return self._memory

    def set(self, key: str, value: str):
        "Set something as a key"
        self._get_memory()[key] = value

    def get(self, key: str):
        "Get something from a key"
        return self._get_memory().get(key) or ""

    def append(self, key: str, value: str):
        "Append something as a key"
        memory = self._get_memory()
        memory[key] = (memory.get(key) or "") + "\n" + value

    def keys(self):
        "Return a list of keys"
        return list(self._get_memory().keys())

You can then use that from Python like this:

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4.1-mini")
memory = Memory()

conversation = model.conversation(tools=[memory])
print(conversation.chain("Set name to Simon", after_call=print).text())

print(memory._memory)
# Should show {'name': 'Simon'}

print(conversation.chain("Set name to Penguin", after_call=print).text())
# Now it should be {'name': 'Penguin'}

print(conversation.chain("Print current name", after_call=print).text())

See the register_tools() plugin hook documentation for an example of this tool in action as a CLI plugin.

Sometimes you may need to register additional tools against a toolbox after it has been created - for example if you are implementing an MCP plugin where the toolbox needs to consult the MCP server to discover what tools are available.

You can use the toolbox.add_tool(function_or_tool) method to add a new tool to an existing toolbox.

This can be passed a llm.Tool instance or a function that will be converted into a tool automatically.

If you want your function to be able to access the toolbox instance itself as a self parameter, pass that function to add_tool() with the pass_self=True parameter:

def my_function(self, arg1: str, arg2: int) -> str:
    return f"Received {arg1} and {arg2} in {self}"

toolbox.add_tool(my_function, pass_self=True)

Without pass_self=True the function will be called with only its declared arguments, with no self parameter.

If your toolbox needs to run an additional command to figure out what it should register using .add_tool() you can implement a prepare() method on your toolbox class. This will be called once automatically when the toolbox is first used.

In asynchronous contexts the alternative method await toolbox.prepare_async() method will be called before the toolbox is used. You can implement this method on your subclass and use it to run asynchronous operations that discover tools to be registered using self.add_tool().

If you want to prepare the class in this way such that it can be used in both synchronous and asynchronous contexts, implement both prepare() and prepare_async() methods.

As with the CLI tool some models support passing a JSON schema should be used for the resulting response.

You can pass this to the prompt(schema=) parameter as either a Python dictionary or a Pydantic BaseModel subclass:

import llm, json
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Dog(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
response = model.prompt("Describe a nice dog", schema=Dog)
dog = json.loads(response.text())
print(dog)
# {"name":"Buddy","age":3}

You can also pass a schema directly, like this:

response = model.prompt("Describe a nice dog", schema={
    "properties": {
        "name": {"title": "Name", "type": "string"},
        "age": {"title": "Age", "type": "integer"},
    },
    "required": ["name", "age"],
    "title": "Dog",
    "type": "object",
})

You can also use LLM's alternative schema syntax via the llm.schema_dsl(schema_dsl) function. This provides a quick way to construct a JSON schema for simple cases:

print(model.prompt(
    "Describe a nice dog with a surprising name",
    schema=llm.schema_dsl("name, age int, bio")
))

Pass multi=True to generate a schema that returns multiple items matching that specification:

print(model.prompt(
    "Describe 3 nice dogs with surprising names",
    schema=llm.schema_dsl("name, age int, bio", multi=True)
))

The fragment system from the CLI tool can also be accessed from the Python API, by passing fragments= and/or system_fragments= lists of strings to the prompt() method:

response = model.prompt(
    "What do these documents say about dogs?",
    fragments=[
        open("dogs1.txt").read(),
        open("dogs2.txt").read(),
    ],
    system_fragments=[
        "You answer questions like Snoopy",
    ]
)

This mechanism has limited utility in Python, as you can also assemble the contents of these strings together into the prompt= and system= strings directly.

Fragments become more interesting if you are working with LLM's mechanisms for storing prompts to a SQLite database, which are not yet part of the stable, documented Python API.

Some model plugins may include features that take advantage of fragments, for example llm-anthropic aims to use them as part of a mechanism that taps into Claude's prompt caching system.

For models that support options (view those with llm models --options) you can pass options as keyword arguments to the .prompt() method:

model = llm.get_model()
print(model.prompt("Names for otters", temperature=0.2))

Models that accept API keys should take an additional key= parameter to their model.prompt() method:

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
print(model.prompt("Names for beavers", key="sk-..."))

If you don't provide this argument LLM will attempt to find it from an environment variable (OPENAI_API_KEY for OpenAI, others for different plugins) or from keys that have been saved using the llm keys set command.

Some model plugins may not yet have been upgraded to handle the key= parameter, in which case you will need to use one of the other mechanisms.

Any models you have installed as plugins will also be available through this mechanism, for example to use Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet model with llm-anthropic:

pip install llm-anthropic

Then in your Python code:

import llm

model = llm.get_model("claude-3.5-sonnet")
# Use this if you have not set the key using 'llm keys set claude':
model.key = 'YOUR_API_KEY_HERE'
response = model.prompt("Five surprising names for a pet pelican")
print(response.text())

Some models do not use API keys at all.

Most model plugins also make a JSON version of the prompt response available. The structure of this will differ between model plugins, so building against this is likely to result in code that only works with that specific model provider.

You can access this JSON data as a Python dictionary using the response.json() method:

import llm
from pprint import pprint

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
response = model.prompt("3 names for an otter")
json_data = response.json()
pprint(json_data)

Here's that example output from GPT-4o mini:

{'content': 'Sure! Here are three fun names for an otter:\n'
            '\n'
            '1. **Splash**\n'
            '2. **Bubbles**\n'
            '3. **Otto** \n'
            '\n'
            'Feel free to mix and match or use these as inspiration!',
 'created': 1739291215,
 'finish_reason': 'stop',
 'id': 'chatcmpl-AznO31yxgBjZ4zrzBOwJvHEWgdTaf',
 'model': 'gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18',
 'object': 'chat.completion.chunk',
 'usage': {'completion_tokens': 43,
           'completion_tokens_details': {'accepted_prediction_tokens': 0,
                                         'audio_tokens': 0,
                                         'reasoning_tokens': 0,
                                         'rejected_prediction_tokens': 0},
           'prompt_tokens': 13,
           'prompt_tokens_details': {'audio_tokens': 0, 'cached_tokens': 0},
           'total_tokens': 56}}

Many models can return a count of the number of tokens used while executing the prompt.

The response.usage() method provides an abstraction over this:

pprint(response.usage())

Example output:

Usage(input=5,
      output=2,
      details={'candidatesTokensDetails': [{'modality': 'TEXT',
                                            'tokenCount': 2}],
               'promptTokensDetails': [{'modality': 'TEXT', 'tokenCount': 5}]})

The .input and .output properties are integers representing the number of input and output tokens. The .details property may be a dictionary with additional custom values that vary by model.

For models that support it you can stream responses as they are generated, like this:

response = model.prompt("Five diabolical names for a pet goat")
for chunk in response:
    print(chunk, end="")

The response.text() method described earlier does this for you - it runs through the iterator and gathers the results into a string.

If a response has been evaluated, response.text() will continue to return the same string.

Some plugins provide async versions of their supported models, suitable for use with Python asyncio.

To use an async model, use the llm.get_async_model() function instead of llm.get_model():

import llm
model = llm.get_async_model("gpt-4o")

You can then run a prompt using await model.prompt(...):

print(await model.prompt(
    "Five surprising names for a pet pelican"
).text())

Or use async for chunk in ... to stream the response as it is generated:

async for chunk in model.prompt(
    "Five surprising names for a pet pelican"
):
    print(chunk, end="", flush=True)

This await model.prompt() method takes the same arguments as the synchronous model.prompt() method, for options and attachments and key= and suchlike.

Tool functions can be both synchronous or asynchronous. The latter are defined using async def tool_name(...). Either kind of function can be passed to the tools=[...] parameter.

If an async def function is used in a synchronous context LLM will automatically execute it in a thread pool using asyncio.run(). This means the following will work even in non-asynchronous Python scripts:

async def hello(name: str) -> str:
    "Say hello to name"
    return "Hello there " + name

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4.1-mini")
chain_response = model.chain(
    "Say hello to Percival", tools=[hello]
)
print(chain_response.text())

This also works for async def methods of llm.Toolbox subclasses.

Tool use is also supported for async models, using either synchronous or asynchronous tool functions. Synchronous functions will block the event loop so only use those in asynchronous context if you are certain they are extremely fast.

The response.execute_tool_calls() and chain_response.text() and chain_response.responses() methods must all be awaited when run against asynchronous models:

import llm
model = llm.get_async_model("gpt-4.1")

def upper(string):
    "Converts string to uppercase"
    return string.upper()

chain = model.chain(
    "Convert panda to uppercase then pelican to uppercase",
    tools=[upper],
    after_call=print
)
print(await chain.text())

To iterate over the chained response output as it arrives use async for:

async for chunk in model.chain(
    "Convert panda to uppercase then pelican to uppercase",
    tools=[upper]
):
    print(chunk, end="", flush=True)

The before_call and after_call hooks can be async functions when used with async models.

LLM supports conversations, where you ask follow-up questions of a model as part of an ongoing conversation.

To start a new conversation, use the model.conversation() method:

model = llm.get_model()
conversation = model.conversation()

You can then use the conversation.prompt() method to execute prompts against this conversation:

response = conversation.prompt("Five fun facts about pelicans")
print(response.text())

This works exactly the same as the model.prompt() method, except that the conversation will be maintained across multiple prompts. So if you run this next:

response2 = conversation.prompt("Now do skunks")
print(response2.text())

You will get back five fun facts about skunks.

The conversation.prompt() method supports attachments as well:

response = conversation.prompt(
    "Describe these birds",
    attachments=[
        llm.Attachment(url="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg")
    ]
)

Access conversation.responses for a list of all of the responses that have so far been returned during the conversation.

You can pass a list of tool functions to the tools=[] argument when you start a new conversation:

import llm

def upper(text: str) -> str:
    "convert text to upper case"
    return text.upper()

def reverse(text: str) -> str:
    "reverse text"
    return text[::-1]

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4.1-mini")
conversation = model.conversation(tools=[upper, reverse])

You can then call the conversation.chain() method multiple times to have a conversation that uses those tools:

print(conversation.chain(
    "Convert panda to uppercase and reverse it"
).text())
print(conversation.chain(
    "Same with pangolin"
).text())

The before_call= and after_call= parameters described above can be passed directly to the model.conversation() method to set those options for all chained prompts in that conversation.

The llm.get_models() list returns a list of all available models, including those from plugins.

import llm

for model in llm.get_models():
    print(model.model_id)

Use llm.get_async_models() to list async models:

for model in llm.get_async_models():
    print(model.model_id)

For some applications, such as tracking the tokens used by an application, it may be useful to execute code as soon as a response has finished being executed

You can do this using the response.on_done(callback) method, which causes your callback function to be called as soon as the response has finished (all tokens have been returned).

The signature of the method you provide is def callback(response) - it can be optionally an async def method when working with asynchronous models.

Example usage:

import llm

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
response = model.prompt("a poem about a hippo")
response.on_done(lambda response: print(response.usage()))
print(response.text())

Which outputs:

Usage(input=20, output=494, details={})
In a sunlit glade by a bubbling brook,
Lived a hefty hippo, with a curious look.
...

Or using an asyncio model, where you need to await response.on_done(done) to queue up the callback:

import asyncio, llm

async def run():
    model = llm.get_async_model("gpt-4o-mini")
    response = model.prompt("a short poem about a brick")
    async def done(response):
        print(await response.usage())
        print(await response.text())
    await response.on_done(done)
    print(await response.text())

asyncio.run(run())

The llm top level package includes some useful utility functions.

The llm.set_alias() function can be used to define a new alias:

import llm

llm.set_alias("mini", "gpt-4o-mini")

The second argument can be a model identifier or another alias, in which case that alias will be resolved.

If the aliases.json file does not exist or contains invalid JSON it will be created or overwritten.

Removes the alias with the given name from the aliases.json file.

Raises KeyError if the alias does not exist.

import llm

llm.remove_alias("turbo")

This sets the default model to the given model ID or alias. Any changes to defaults will be persisted in the LLM configuration folder, and will affect all programs using LLM on the system, including the llm CLI tool.

import llm

llm.set_default_model("claude-3.5-sonnet")

This returns the currently configured default model, or gpt-4o-mini if no default has been set.

import llm

model_id = llm.get_default_model()

To detect if no default has been set you can use this pattern:

if llm.get_default_model(default=None) is None:
    print("No default has been set")

Here the default= parameter specifies the value that should be returned if there is no configured default.

These two methods work the same as set_default_model() and get_default_model() but for the default embedding model instead.

llm defaults to logging all prompts and responses to a SQLite database.

You can find the location of that database using the llm logs path command:

llm logs path

On my Mac that outputs:

/Users/simon/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/logs.db

This will differ for other operating systems.

To avoid logging an individual prompt, pass --no-log or -n to the command:

llm 'Ten names for cheesecakes' -n

To turn logging by default off:

llm logs off

If you've turned off logging you can still log an individual prompt and response by adding --log:

llm 'Five ambitious names for a pet pterodactyl' --log

To turn logging by default back on again:

llm logs on

To see the status of the logs database, run this:

llm logs status

Example output:

Logging is ON for all prompts
Found log database at /Users/simon/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/logs.db
Number of conversations logged: 33
Number of responses logged:     48
Database file size:             19.96MB

You can view the logs using the llm logs command:

llm logs

This will output the three most recent logged items in Markdown format, showing both the prompt and the response formatted using Markdown.

To get back just the most recent prompt response as plain text, add -r/--response:

llm logs -r

Use -x/--extract to extract and return the first fenced code block from the selected log entries:

llm logs --extract

Or --xl/--extract-last for the last fenced code block:

llm logs --extract-last

Add --json to get the log messages in JSON instead:

llm logs --json

Add -n 10 to see the ten most recent items:

llm logs -n 10

Or -n 0 to see everything that has ever been logged:

llm logs -n 0

You can truncate the display of the prompts and responses using the -t/--truncate option. This can help make the JSON output more readable - though the --short option is usually better.

llm logs -n 1 -t --json

Example output:

[
  {
    "id": "01jm8ec74wxsdatyn5pq1fp0s5",
    "model": "anthropic/claude-3-haiku-20240307",
    "prompt": "hi",
    "system": null,
    "prompt_json": null,
    "response": "Hello! How can I assist you today?",
    "conversation_id": "01jm8ec74taftdgj2t4zra9z0j",
    "duration_ms": 560,
    "datetime_utc": "2025-02-16T22:34:30.374882+00:00",
    "input_tokens": 8,
    "output_tokens": 12,
    "token_details": null,
    "conversation_name": "hi",
    "conversation_model": "anthropic/claude-3-haiku-20240307",
    "attachments": []
  }
]

Use -s/--short to see a shortened YAML log with truncated prompts and no responses:

llm logs -n 2 --short

Example output:

- model: deepseek-reasoner
  datetime: '2025-02-02T06:39:53'
  conversation: 01jk2pk05xq3d0vgk0202zrsg1
  prompt:  H01 There are five huts. H02 The Scotsman lives in the purple hut. H03 The Welshman owns the parrot. H04 Kombucha is...
- model: o3-mini
  datetime: '2025-02-02T19:03:05'
  conversation: 01jk40qkxetedzpf1zd8k9bgww
  system: Formatting re-enabled. Write a detailed README with extensive usage examples.
  prompt: <documents> <document index="1"> <source>./Cargo.toml</source> <document_content> [package] name = "py-limbo" version...

Include -u/--usage to include token usage information:

llm logs -n 1 --short --usage

Example output:

- model: o3-mini
  datetime: '2025-02-16T23:00:56'
  conversation: 01jm8fxxnef92n1663c6ays8xt
  system: Produce Python code that demonstrates every possible usage of yaml.dump
    with all of the arguments it can take, especi...
  prompt: <documents> <document index="1"> <source>./setup.py</source> <document_content>
    NAME = 'PyYAML' VERSION = '7.0.0.dev0...
  usage:
    input: 74793
    output: 3550
    details:
      completion_tokens_details:
        reasoning_tokens: 2240

To view the logs for the most recent conversation you have had with a model, use -c:

llm logs -c

To see logs for a specific conversation based on its ID, use --cid ID or --conversation ID:

llm logs --cid 01h82n0q9crqtnzmf13gkyxawg

You can search the logs for a search term in the prompt or the response columns.

llm logs -q 'cheesecake'

The most relevant results will be shown first.

To switch to sorting with most recent first, add -l/--latest. This can be combined with -n to limit the number of results shown:

llm logs -q 'cheesecake' -l -n 3

If you want to retrieve all of the logs that were recorded since a specific response ID you can do so using these options:

• --id-gt $ID - every record with an ID greater than $ID
• --id-gte $ID - every record with an ID greater than or equal to $ID

IDs are always issued in ascending order by time, so this provides a useful way to see everything that has happened since a particular record.

This can be particularly useful when working with schema data, where you might want to access every record that you have created using a specific --schema but exclude records you have previously processed.

You can filter to logs just for a specific model (or model alias) using -m/--model:

llm logs -m chatgpt

The -f/--fragment X option will filter for just responses that were created using the specified fragment hash or alias or URL or filename.

Fragments are displayed in the logs as their hash ID. Add -e/--expand to display fragments as their full content - this option works for both the default Markdown and the --json mode:

llm logs -f https://llm.datasette.io/robots.txt --expand

You can display just the content for a specific fragment hash ID (or alias) using the llm fragments show command:

llm fragments show 993fd38d898d2b59fd2d16c811da5bdac658faa34f0f4d411edde7c17ebb0680

If you provide multiple fragments you will get back responses that used all of those fragments.

You can filter for responses that used tools from specific fragments with the --tool/-T option:

llm logs -T simple_eval

This will match responses that involved a result from that tool. If the tool was not executed it will not be included in the filtered responses.

Pass --tool/-T multiple times for responses that used all of the specified tools.

Use the llm logs --tools flag to see all responses that involved at least one tool result, including from --functions:

llm logs --tools

The --schema X option can be used to view responses that used the specified schema, using any of the ways to specify a schema:

llm logs --schema 'name, age int, bio'

This can be combined with --data and --data-array and --data-key to extract just the returned JSON data - consult the schemas documentation for details.

You can also use Datasette to browse your logs like this:

datasette "$(llm logs path)"

You can backup your logs to another file using the llm logs backup command:

llm logs backup /tmp/backup.db

This uses SQLite VACUUM INTO under the hood.

Here's the SQL schema used by the logs.db database:

CREATE TABLE [conversations] (
  [id] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  [name] TEXT,
  [model] TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE [schemas] (
  [id] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  [content] TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE "responses" (
  [id] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  [model] TEXT,
  [prompt] TEXT,
  [system] TEXT,
  [prompt_json] TEXT,
  [options_json] TEXT,
  [response] TEXT,
  [response_json] TEXT,
  [conversation_id] TEXT REFERENCES [conversations]([id]),
  [duration_ms] INTEGER,
  [datetime_utc] TEXT,
  [input_tokens] INTEGER,
  [output_tokens] INTEGER,
  [token_details] TEXT,
  [schema_id] TEXT REFERENCES [schemas]([id]),
  [resolved_model] TEXT
);
CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE [responses_fts] USING FTS5 (
  [prompt],
  [response],
  content=[responses]
);
CREATE TABLE [attachments] (
  [id] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  [type] TEXT,
  [path] TEXT,
  [url] TEXT,
  [content] BLOB
);
CREATE TABLE [prompt_attachments] (
  [response_id] TEXT REFERENCES [responses]([id]),
  [attachment_id] TEXT REFERENCES [attachments]([id]),
  [order] INTEGER,
  PRIMARY KEY ([response_id],
  [attachment_id])
);
CREATE TABLE [fragments] (
  [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  [hash] TEXT,
  [content] TEXT,
  [datetime_utc] TEXT,
  [source] TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE [fragment_aliases] (
  [alias] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
  [fragment_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [fragments]([id])
);
CREATE TABLE "prompt_fragments" (
  [response_id] TEXT REFERENCES [responses]([id]),
  [fragment_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [fragments]([id]),
  [order] INTEGER,
  PRIMARY KEY ([response_id],
  [fragment_id],
  [order])
);
CREATE TABLE "system_fragments" (
  [response_id] TEXT REFERENCES [responses]([id]),
  [fragment_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [fragments]([id]),
  [order] INTEGER,
  PRIMARY KEY ([response_id],
  [fragment_id],
  [order])
);
CREATE TABLE [tools] (
  [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  [hash] TEXT,
  [name] TEXT,
  [description] TEXT,
  [input_schema] TEXT,
  [plugin] TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE [tool_responses] (
  [tool_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [tools]([id]),
  [response_id] TEXT REFERENCES [responses]([id]),
  PRIMARY KEY ([tool_id],
  [response_id])
);
CREATE TABLE [tool_calls] (
  [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  [response_id] TEXT REFERENCES [responses]([id]),
  [tool_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [tools]([id]),
  [name] TEXT,
  [arguments] TEXT,
  [tool_call_id] TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE "tool_results" (
  [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  [response_id] TEXT REFERENCES [responses]([id]),
  [tool_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [tools]([id]),
  [name] TEXT,
  [output] TEXT,
  [tool_call_id] TEXT,
  [instance_id] INTEGER REFERENCES [tool_instances]([id]),
  [exception] TEXT
);
CREATE TABLE [tool_instances] (
  [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  [plugin] TEXT,
  [name] TEXT,
  [arguments] TEXT
);

responses_fts configures SQLite full-text search against the prompt and response columns in the responses table.

The following tools are designed to be used with LLM:

strip-tags is a command for stripping tags from HTML. This is useful when working with LLMs because HTML tags can use up a lot of your token budget.

Here's how to summarize the front page of the New York Times, by both stripping tags and filtering to just the elements with class="story-wrapper":

curl -s https://www.nytimes.com/ \
  | strip-tags .story-wrapper \
  | llm -s 'summarize the news'

llm, ttok and strip-tags—CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs describes ways to use strip-tags in more detail.

ttok is a command-line tool for counting OpenAI tokens. You can use it to check if input is likely to fit in the token limit for GPT 3.5 or GPT4:

cat my-file.txt | ttok

125

It can also truncate input down to a desired number of tokens:

ttok This is too many tokens -t 3

This is too

This is useful for truncating a large document down to a size where it can be processed by an LLM.

Symbex is a tool for searching for symbols in Python codebases. It's useful for extracting just the code for a specific problem and then piping that into LLM for explanation, refactoring or other tasks.

Here's how to use it to find all functions that match test*csv* and use those to guess what the software under test does:

symbex 'test*csv*' | \
  llm --system 'based on these tests guess what this tool does'

It can also be used to export symbols in a format that can be piped to llm embed-multi in order to create embeddings:

symbex '*' '*:*' --nl | \
  llm embed-multi symbols - \
  --format nl --database embeddings.db --store

For more examples see Symbex: search Python code for functions and classes, then pipe them into a LLM.

This page lists the --help output for all of the llm commands.

Usage: llm [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Access Large Language Models from the command-line

  Documentation: https://llm.datasette.io/

  LLM can run models from many different providers. Consult the plugin directory
  for a list of available models:

  https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/plugins/directory.html

  To get started with OpenAI, obtain an API key from them and:

      $ llm keys set openai
      Enter key: ...

  Then execute a prompt like this:

      llm 'Five outrageous names for a pet pelican'

  For a full list of prompting options run:

      llm prompt --help

Options:
  --version   Show the version and exit.
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  prompt*       Execute a prompt
  aliases       Manage model aliases
  chat          Hold an ongoing chat with a model.
  collections   View and manage collections of embeddings
  embed         Embed text and store or return the result
  embed-models  Manage available embedding models
  embed-multi   Store embeddings for multiple strings at once in the...
  fragments     Manage fragments that are stored in the database
  install       Install packages from PyPI into the same environment as LLM
  keys          Manage stored API keys for different models
  logs          Tools for exploring logged prompts and responses
  models        Manage available models
  openai        Commands for working directly with the OpenAI API
  plugins       List installed plugins
  schemas       Manage stored schemas
  similar       Return top N similar IDs from a collection using cosine...
  templates     Manage stored prompt templates
  tools         Manage tools that can be made available to LLMs
  uninstall     Uninstall Python packages from the LLM environment

Usage: llm prompt [OPTIONS] [PROMPT]

  Execute a prompt

  Documentation: https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/usage.html

  Examples:

      llm 'Capital of France?'
      llm 'Capital of France?' -m gpt-4o
      llm 'Capital of France?' -s 'answer in Spanish'

  Multi-modal models can be called with attachments like this:

      llm 'Extract text from this image' -a image.jpg
      llm 'Describe' -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg
      cat image | llm 'describe image' -a -
      # With an explicit mimetype:
      cat image | llm 'describe image' --at - image/jpeg

  The -x/--extract option returns just the content of the first ``` fenced code
  block, if one is present. If none are present it returns the full response.

      llm 'JavaScript function for reversing a string' -x

Options:
  -s, --system TEXT               System prompt to use
  -m, --model TEXT                Model to use
  -d, --database FILE             Path to log database
  -q, --query TEXT                Use first model matching these strings
  -a, --attachment ATTACHMENT     Attachment path or URL or -
  --at, --attachment-type <TEXT TEXT>...
                                  Attachment with explicit mimetype,
                                  --at image.jpg image/jpeg
  -T, --tool TEXT                 Name of a tool to make available to the model
  --functions TEXT                Python code block or file path defining
                                  functions to register as tools
  --td, --tools-debug             Show full details of tool executions
  --ta, --tools-approve           Manually approve every tool execution
  --cl, --chain-limit INTEGER     How many chained tool responses to allow,
                                  default 5, set 0 for unlimited
  -o, --option <TEXT TEXT>...     key/value options for the model
  --schema TEXT                   JSON schema, filepath or ID
  --schema-multi TEXT             JSON schema to use for multiple results
  -f, --fragment TEXT             Fragment (alias, URL, hash or file path) to
                                  add to the prompt
  --sf, --system-fragment TEXT    Fragment to add to system prompt
  -t, --template TEXT             Template to use
  -p, --param <TEXT TEXT>...      Parameters for template
  --no-stream                     Do not stream output
  -n, --no-log                    Don't log to database
  --log                           Log prompt and response to the database
  -c, --continue                  Continue the most recent conversation.
  --cid, --conversation TEXT      Continue the conversation with the given ID.
  --key TEXT                      API key to use
  --save TEXT                     Save prompt with this template name
  --async                         Run prompt asynchronously
  -u, --usage                     Show token usage
  -x, --extract                   Extract first fenced code block
  --xl, --extract-last            Extract last fenced code block
  -h, --help                      Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm chat [OPTIONS]

  Hold an ongoing chat with a model.

Options:
  -s, --system TEXT             System prompt to use
  -m, --model TEXT              Model to use
  -c, --continue                Continue the most recent conversation.
  --cid, --conversation TEXT    Continue the conversation with the given ID.
  -f, --fragment TEXT           Fragment (alias, URL, hash or file path) to add
                                to the prompt
  --sf, --system-fragment TEXT  Fragment to add to system prompt
  -t, --template TEXT           Template to use
  -p, --param <TEXT TEXT>...    Parameters for template
  -o, --option <TEXT TEXT>...   key/value options for the model
  -d, --database FILE           Path to log database
  --no-stream                   Do not stream output
  --key TEXT                    API key to use
  -T, --tool TEXT               Name of a tool to make available to the model
  --functions TEXT              Python code block or file path defining
                                functions to register as tools
  --td, --tools-debug           Show full details of tool executions
  --ta, --tools-approve         Manually approve every tool execution
  --cl, --chain-limit INTEGER   How many chained tool responses to allow,
                                default 5, set 0 for unlimited
  -h, --help                    Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm keys [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage stored API keys for different models

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*  List names of all stored keys
  get    Return the value of a stored key
  path   Output the path to the keys.json file
  set    Save a key in the keys.json file

Usage: llm keys list [OPTIONS]

  List names of all stored keys

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm keys path [OPTIONS]

  Output the path to the keys.json file

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm keys get [OPTIONS] NAME

  Return the value of a stored key

  Example usage:

      export OPENAI_API_KEY=$(llm keys get openai)

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm keys set [OPTIONS] NAME

  Save a key in the keys.json file

  Example usage:

      $ llm keys set openai
      Enter key: ...

Options:
  --value TEXT  Value to set
  -h, --help    Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm logs [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Tools for exploring logged prompts and responses

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*   Show logged prompts and their responses
  backup  Backup your logs database to this file
  off     Turn off logging for all prompts
  on      Turn on logging for all prompts
  path    Output the path to the logs.db file
  status  Show current status of database logging

Usage: llm logs path [OPTIONS]

  Output the path to the logs.db file

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm logs status [OPTIONS]

  Show current status of database logging

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm logs backup [OPTIONS] PATH

  Backup your logs database to this file

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm logs on [OPTIONS]

  Turn on logging for all prompts

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm logs off [OPTIONS]

  Turn off logging for all prompts

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm logs list [OPTIONS]

  Show logged prompts and their responses

Options:
  -n, --count INTEGER         Number of entries to show - defaults to 3, use 0
                              for all
  -d, --database FILE         Path to log database
  -m, --model TEXT            Filter by model or model alias
  -q, --query TEXT            Search for logs matching this string
  -f, --fragment TEXT         Filter for prompts using these fragments
  -T, --tool TEXT             Filter for prompts with results from these tools
  --tools                     Filter for prompts with results from any tools
  --schema TEXT               JSON schema, filepath or ID
  --schema-multi TEXT         JSON schema used for multiple results
  -l, --latest                Return latest results matching search query
  --data                      Output newline-delimited JSON data for schema
  --data-array                Output JSON array of data for schema
  --data-key TEXT             Return JSON objects from array in this key
  --data-ids                  Attach corresponding IDs to JSON objects
  -t, --truncate              Truncate long strings in output
  -s, --short                 Shorter YAML output with truncated prompts
  -u, --usage                 Include token usage
  -r, --response              Just output the last response
  -x, --extract               Extract first fenced code block
  --xl, --extract-last        Extract last fenced code block
  -c, --current               Show logs from the current conversation
  --cid, --conversation TEXT  Show logs for this conversation ID
  --id-gt TEXT                Return responses with ID > this
  --id-gte TEXT               Return responses with ID >= this
  --json                      Output logs as JSON
  -e, --expand                Expand fragments to show their content
  -h, --help                  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm models [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage available models

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*    List available models
  default  Show or set the default model
  options  Manage default options for models

Usage: llm models list [OPTIONS]

  List available models

Options:
  --options         Show options for each model, if available
  --async           List async models
  --schemas         List models that support schemas
  --tools           List models that support tools
  -q, --query TEXT  Search for models matching these strings
  -m, --model TEXT  Specific model IDs
  -h, --help        Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm models default [OPTIONS] [MODEL]

  Show or set the default model

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm models options [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage default options for models

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*  List default options for all models
  clear  Clear default option(s) for a model
  set    Set a default option for a model
  show   List default options set for a specific model

Usage: llm models options list [OPTIONS]

  List default options for all models

  Example usage:

      llm models options list

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm models options show [OPTIONS] MODEL

  List default options set for a specific model

  Example usage:

      llm models options show gpt-4o

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm models options set [OPTIONS] MODEL KEY VALUE

  Set a default option for a model

  Example usage:

      llm models options set gpt-4o temperature 0.5

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm models options clear [OPTIONS] MODEL [KEY]

  Clear default option(s) for a model

  Example usage:

      llm models options clear gpt-4o
      # Or for a single option
      llm models options clear gpt-4o temperature

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm templates [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage stored prompt templates

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*    List available prompt templates
  edit     Edit the specified prompt template using the default $EDITOR
  loaders  Show template loaders registered by plugins
  path     Output the path to the templates directory
  show     Show the specified prompt template

Usage: llm templates list [OPTIONS]

  List available prompt templates

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm templates show [OPTIONS] NAME

  Show the specified prompt template

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm templates edit [OPTIONS] NAME

  Edit the specified prompt template using the default $EDITOR

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm templates path [OPTIONS]

  Output the path to the templates directory

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm templates loaders [OPTIONS]

  Show template loaders registered by plugins

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm schemas [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage stored schemas

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*  List stored schemas
  dsl    Convert LLM's schema DSL to a JSON schema
  show   Show a stored schema

Usage: llm schemas list [OPTIONS]

  List stored schemas

Options:
  -d, --database FILE  Path to log database
  -q, --query TEXT     Search for schemas matching this string
  --full               Output full schema contents
  --json               Output as JSON
  --nl                 Output as newline-delimited JSON
  -h, --help           Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm schemas show [OPTIONS] SCHEMA_ID

  Show a stored schema

Options:
  -d, --database FILE  Path to log database
  -h, --help           Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm schemas dsl [OPTIONS] INPUT

  Convert LLM's schema DSL to a JSON schema

      llm schema dsl 'name, age int, bio: their bio'

Options:
  --multi     Wrap in an array
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm tools [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage tools that can be made available to LLMs

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*  List available tools that have been provided by plugins

Usage: llm tools list [OPTIONS] [TOOL_DEFS]...

  List available tools that have been provided by plugins

Options:
  --json            Output as JSON
  --functions TEXT  Python code block or file path defining functions to
                    register as tools
  -h, --help        Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm aliases [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage model aliases

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*   List current aliases
  path    Output the path to the aliases.json file
  remove  Remove an alias
  set     Set an alias for a model

Usage: llm aliases list [OPTIONS]

  List current aliases

Options:
  --json      Output as JSON
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm aliases set [OPTIONS] ALIAS [MODEL_ID]

  Set an alias for a model

  Example usage:

      llm aliases set mini gpt-4o-mini

  Alternatively you can omit the model ID and specify one or more -q options.
  The first model matching all of those query strings will be used.

      llm aliases set mini -q 4o -q mini

Options:
  -q, --query TEXT  Set alias for model matching these strings
  -h, --help        Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm aliases remove [OPTIONS] ALIAS

  Remove an alias

  Example usage:

      $ llm aliases remove turbo

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm aliases path [OPTIONS]

  Output the path to the aliases.json file

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm fragments [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage fragments that are stored in the database

  Fragments are reusable snippets of text that are shared across multiple
  prompts.

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*    List current fragments
  loaders  Show fragment loaders registered by plugins
  remove   Remove a fragment alias
  set      Set an alias for a fragment
  show     Display the fragment stored under an alias or hash

Usage: llm fragments list [OPTIONS]

  List current fragments

Options:
  -q, --query TEXT  Search for fragments matching these strings
  --aliases         Show only fragments with aliases
  --json            Output as JSON
  -h, --help        Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm fragments set [OPTIONS] ALIAS FRAGMENT

  Set an alias for a fragment

  Accepts an alias and a file path, URL, hash or '-' for stdin

  Example usage:

      llm fragments set mydocs ./docs.md

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm fragments show [OPTIONS] ALIAS_OR_HASH

  Display the fragment stored under an alias or hash

      llm fragments show mydocs

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm fragments remove [OPTIONS] ALIAS

  Remove a fragment alias

  Example usage:

      llm fragments remove docs

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm fragments loaders [OPTIONS]

  Show fragment loaders registered by plugins

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm plugins [OPTIONS]

  List installed plugins

Options:
  --all        Include built-in default plugins
  --hook TEXT  Filter for plugins that implement this hook
  -h, --help   Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm install [OPTIONS] [PACKAGES]...

  Install packages from PyPI into the same environment as LLM

Options:
  -U, --upgrade        Upgrade packages to latest version
  -e, --editable TEXT  Install a project in editable mode from this path
  --force-reinstall    Reinstall all packages even if they are already up-to-
                       date
  --no-cache-dir       Disable the cache
  --pre                Include pre-release and development versions
  -h, --help           Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm uninstall [OPTIONS] PACKAGES...

  Uninstall Python packages from the LLM environment

Options:
  -y, --yes   Don't ask for confirmation
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm embed [OPTIONS] [COLLECTION] [ID]

  Embed text and store or return the result

Options:
  -i, --input PATH                File to embed
  -m, --model TEXT                Embedding model to use
  --store                         Store the text itself in the database
  -d, --database FILE
  -c, --content TEXT              Content to embed
  --binary                        Treat input as binary data
  --metadata TEXT                 JSON object metadata to store
  -f, --format [json|blob|base64|hex]
                                  Output format
  -h, --help                      Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm embed-multi [OPTIONS] COLLECTION [INPUT_PATH]

  Store embeddings for multiple strings at once in the specified collection.

  Input data can come from one of three sources:

  1. A CSV, TSV, JSON or JSONL file:
     - CSV/TSV: First column is ID, remaining columns concatenated as content
     - JSON: Array of objects with "id" field and content fields
     - JSONL: Newline-delimited JSON objects

     Examples:
       llm embed-multi docs input.csv
       cat data.json | llm embed-multi docs -
       llm embed-multi docs input.json --format json

  2. A SQL query against a SQLite database:
     - First column returned is used as ID
     - Other columns concatenated to form content

     Examples:
       llm embed-multi docs --sql "SELECT id, title, body FROM posts"
       llm embed-multi docs --attach blog blog.db --sql "SELECT id, content FROM blog.posts"

  3. Files in directories matching glob patterns:
     - Each file becomes one embedding
     - Relative file paths become IDs

     Examples:
       llm embed-multi docs --files docs '**/*.md'
       llm embed-multi images --files photos '*.jpg' --binary
       llm embed-multi texts --files texts '*.txt' --encoding utf-8 --encoding latin-1

Options:
  --format [json|csv|tsv|nl]   Format of input file - defaults to auto-detect
  --files <DIRECTORY TEXT>...  Embed files in this directory - specify directory
                               and glob pattern
  --encoding TEXT              Encodings to try when reading --files
  --binary                     Treat --files as binary data
  --sql TEXT                   Read input using this SQL query
  --attach <TEXT FILE>...      Additional databases to attach - specify alias
                               and file path
  --batch-size INTEGER         Batch size to use when running embeddings
  --prefix TEXT                Prefix to add to the IDs
  -m, --model TEXT             Embedding model to use
  --prepend TEXT               Prepend this string to all content before
                               embedding
  --store                      Store the text itself in the database
  -d, --database FILE
  -h, --help                   Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm similar [OPTIONS] COLLECTION [ID]

  Return top N similar IDs from a collection using cosine similarity.

  Example usage:

      llm similar my-collection -c "I like cats"

  Or to find content similar to a specific stored ID:

      llm similar my-collection 1234

Options:
  -i, --input PATH      File to embed for comparison
  -c, --content TEXT    Content to embed for comparison
  --binary              Treat input as binary data
  -n, --number INTEGER  Number of results to return
  -p, --plain           Output in plain text format
  -d, --database FILE
  --prefix TEXT         Just IDs with this prefix
  -h, --help            Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm embed-models [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Manage available embedding models

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*    List available embedding models
  default  Show or set the default embedding model

Usage: llm embed-models list [OPTIONS]

  List available embedding models

Options:
  -q, --query TEXT  Search for embedding models matching these strings
  -h, --help        Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm embed-models default [OPTIONS] [MODEL]

  Show or set the default embedding model

Options:
  --remove-default  Reset to specifying no default model
  -h, --help        Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm collections [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  View and manage collections of embeddings

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  list*   View a list of collections
  delete  Delete the specified collection
  path    Output the path to the embeddings database

Usage: llm collections path [OPTIONS]

  Output the path to the embeddings database

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm collections list [OPTIONS]

  View a list of collections

Options:
  -d, --database FILE  Path to embeddings database
  --json               Output as JSON
  -h, --help           Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm collections delete [OPTIONS] COLLECTION

  Delete the specified collection

  Example usage:

      llm collections delete my-collection

Options:
  -d, --database FILE  Path to embeddings database
  -h, --help           Show this message and exit.

Usage: llm openai [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Commands for working directly with the OpenAI API

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  models  List models available to you from the OpenAI API

Usage: llm openai models [OPTIONS]

  List models available to you from the OpenAI API

Options:
  --json      Output as JSON
  --key TEXT  OpenAI API key
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

To contribute to this tool, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd llm
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Or if you are using pipenv:

pipenv shell

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest

This project uses pytest-recording to record OpenAI API responses for some of the tests, and syrupy to capture snapshots of their results.

If you add a new test that calls the API you can capture the API response and snapshot like this:

PYTEST_OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)" pytest --record-mode once --snapshot-update

Then review the new snapshots in tests/__snapshots__/ to make sure they look correct.

The default OpenAI plugin has a debugging mechanism for showing the exact requests and responses that were sent to the OpenAI API.

Set the LLM_OPENAI_SHOW_RESPONSES environment variable like this:

LLM_OPENAI_SHOW_RESPONSES=1 llm -m chatgpt 'three word slogan for an an otter-run bakery'

This will output details of the API requests and responses to the console.

Use --no-stream to see a more readable version of the body that avoids streaming the response:

LLM_OPENAI_SHOW_RESPONSES=1 llm -m chatgpt --no-stream \
  'three word slogan for an an otter-run bakery'

Documentation for this project uses MyST - it is written in Markdown and rendered using Sphinx.

To build the documentation locally, run the following:

cd docs
pip install -r requirements.txt
make livehtml

This will start a live preview server, using sphinx-autobuild.

The CLI --help examples in the documentation are managed using Cog. Update those files like this:

just cog

You'll need Just installed to run this command.

To release a new version:

1. Update docs/changelog.md with the new changes.
2. Update the version number in pyproject.toml
3. Create a GitHub release for the new version.
4. Wait for the package to push to PyPI and then...
5. Run the regenerate.yaml workflow to update the Homebrew tap to the latest version.

• llm chat -t template now correctly loads any tools that are included in that template. #1239
• Fixed a bug where llm -m gpt5 -o reasoning_effort minimal --save gm saved a template containing invalid YAML. #1237
• Fixed a bug where running llm chat -t template could cause prompts to be duplicated. #1240
• Less confusing error message if a requested toolbox class is unavailable. #1238

This release adds support for the new GPT-5 family of models from OpenAI. It also enhances tool calling in a number of ways, including allowing templates to bundle pre-configured tools.

• New models: gpt-5, gpt-5-mini and gpt-5-nano. #1229
• LLM templates can now include a list of tools. These can be named tools from plugins or arbitrary Python function blocks, see Tools in templates. #1009
• Tools can now return attachments, for models that support features such as image input. #1014
• New methods on the Toolbox class: .add_tool(), .prepare() and .prepare_async(), described in Dynamic toolboxes. #1111
• New model.conversation(before_call=x, after_call=y) attributes for registering callback functions to run before and after tool calls. See  tool debugging hooks for details. #1088
• Some model providers can serve different models from the same configured URL - llm-llama-server for example. Plugins for these providers can now record the resolved model ID of the model that was used to the LLM logs using the response.set_resolved_model(model_id) method. #1117
• Raising llm.CancelToolCall now only cancels the current tool call, passing an error back to the model and allowing it to continue. #1148
• New -l/--latest option for llm logs -q searchterm for searching logs ordered by date (most recent first) instead of the default relevance search. #1177

• Fix for various bugs with different formats of streaming function responses for OpenAI-compatible models. Thanks, James Sanford. #1218
• The register_embedding_models hook is now documented. #1049
• Show visible stack trace for llm templates show invalid-template-name. #1053
• Handle invalid tool names more gracefully in llm chat. #1104
• Add a Tool plugins section to the plugin directory. #1110
• Error on register(Klass) if the passed class is not a subclass of Toolbox. #1114
• Add -h for --help for all llm CLI commands. #1134
• Add missing dataclasses to advanced model plugins docs. #1137
• Fixed a bug where llm logs -T llm_version "version" --async incorrectly recorded just one single log entry when it should have recorded two. #1150
• All extra OpenAI model keys in extra-openai-models.yaml are now documented. #1228

Tool support is finally here! This release adds support exposing tools to LLMs, previously described in the release notes for 0.26a0 and 0.26a1.

Read Large Language Models can run tools in your terminal with LLM 0.26 for a detailed overview of the new features.

Also in this release:

• Two new default tools: llm_version() and llm_time(). #1096, #1103
• Documentation on how to add tool supports to a model plugin. #1000
• Added a prominent warning about the risk of prompt injection when using tools. #1097
• Switched to using monotonic ULIDs for the response IDs in the logs, fixing some intermittent test failures. #1099
• New tool_instances table records details of Toolbox instances created while executing a prompt. #1089
• llm.get_key() is now a documented utility function. #1094

Hopefully the last alpha before a stable release that includes tool support.

• Plugin-provided tools can now be grouped into "Toolboxes".

  • Toolboxes (llm.Toolbox classes) allow plugins to expose multiple related tools that share state or configuration (e.g., a Memory tool or Filesystem tool). (#1059, #1086)

• Tool support for llm chat.

  • The llm chat command now accepts --tool and --functions arguments, allowing interactive chat sessions to use tools. (#1004, #1062)

• Tools can now execute asynchronously.

  • Models that implement AsyncModel can now run tools, including tool functions defined as async def. (#1063)

• llm chat now supports adding fragments during a session.

  • Use the new !fragment <id> command while chatting to insert content from a fragment. Initial fragments can also be passed to llm chat using -f or --sf. Thanks, Dan Turkel. (#1044, #1048)

• Filter llm logs by tools.

  • New --tool <name> option to filter logs to show only responses that involved a specific tool (e.g., --tool simple_eval).
  • The --tools flag shows all responses that used any tool. (#1013, #1072)

• llm schemas list can output JSON.

  • Added --json and --nl (newline-delimited JSON) options to llm schemas list for programmatic access to saved schema definitions. (#1070)

• Filter llm similar results by ID prefix.

  • The new --prefix option for llm similar allows searching for similar items only within IDs that start with a specified string (e.g., llm similar my-collection --prefix 'docs/'). Thanks, Dan Turkel. (#1052)

• Control chained tool execution limit.

  • New --chain-limit <N> (or --cl) option for llm prompt and llm chat to specify the maximum number of consecutive tool calls allowed for a single prompt. Defaults to 5; set to 0 for unlimited. (#1025)

• llm plugins --hook <NAME> option.

  • Filter the list of installed plugins to only show those that implement a specific plugin hook. (#1047)
• llm tools list now shows toolboxes and their methods. (#1013)
• llm prompt and llm chat now automatically re-enable plugin-provided tools when continuing a conversation (-c or --cid). (#1020)
• The --tools-debug option now pretty-prints JSON tool results for improved readability. (#1083)
• New LLM_TOOLS_DEBUG environment variable to permanently enable --tools-debug. (#1045)
• llm chat sessions now correctly respect default model options configured with llm models set-options. Thanks, André Arko. (#985)
• New --pre option for llm install to allow installing pre-release packages. (#1060)
• OpenAI models (gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini) now explicitly declare support for tools and vision. (#1037)
• The supports_tools parameter is now supported in extra-openai-models.yaml. Thanks, Mahesh Hegde . (#1068)

• Fixed a bug where the name parameter in register(function, name="name") was ignored for tool plugins. (#1032)
• Ensure pathlib.Path objects are cast to str before passing to click.edit in llm templates edit. Thanks, Abizer Lokhandwala. (#1031)

This is the first alpha to introduce support for tools! Models with tool capability (which includes the default OpenAI model family) can now be granted access to execute Python functions as part of responding to a prompt.

Tools are supported by the command-line interface:

llm --functions '
def multiply(x: int, y: int) -> int:
    """Multiply two numbers."""
    return x * y
' 'what is 34234 * 213345'

And in the Python API, using a new model.chain() method for executing multiple prompts in a sequence:

import llm

def multiply(x: int, y: int) -> int:
    """Multiply two numbers."""
    return x * y

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4.1-mini")
response = model.chain(
    "What is 34234 * 213345?",
    tools=[multiply]
)
print(response.text())

New tools can also be defined using the register_tools() plugin hook. They can then be called by name from the command-line like this:

llm -T multiply 'What is 34234 * 213345?'

Tool support is currently under active development. Consult this milestone for the latest status.

• New plugin feature: register_fragment_loaders(register) plugins can now return a mixture of fragments and attachments. The llm-video-frames plugin is the first to take advantage of this mechanism. #972
• New OpenAI models: gpt-4.1, gpt-4.1-mini, gpt-41-nano, o3, o4-mini. #945, #965, #976.
• New environment variables: LLM_MODEL and LLM_EMBEDDING_MODEL for setting the model to use without needing to specify -m model_id every time. #932
• New command: llm fragments loaders, to list all currently available fragment loader prefixes provided by plugins. #941
• llm fragments command now shows fragments ordered by the date they were first used. #973
• llm chat now includes a !edit command for editing a prompt using your default terminal text editor. Thanks, Benedikt Willi. #969
• Allow -t and --system to be used at the same time. #916
• Fixed a bug where accessing a model via its alias would fail to respect any default options set for that model. #968
• Improved documentation for extra-openai-models.yaml. Thanks, Rahim Nathwani and Dan Guido. #950, #957
• llm -c/--continue now works correctly with the -d/--database option. llm chat now accepts that -d/--database option. Thanks, Sukhbinder Singh. #933

• llm models --options now shows keys and environment variables for models that use API keys. Thanks, Steve Morin. #903
• Added py.typed marker file so LLM can now be used as a dependency in projects that use mypy without a warning. #887
• $ characters can now be used in templates by escaping them as $$. Thanks, @guspix. #904
• LLM now uses pyproject.toml instead of setup.py. #908

• Fixed a bug on Windows with the new llm -t path/to/file.yaml feature. #901

• Templates can now be specified as a path to a file on disk, using llm -t path/to/file.yaml. This makes them consistent with how -f fragments are loaded. #897
• llm logs backup /tmp/backup.db command for backing up your logs.db database. #879

Support for fragments to help assemble prompts for long context models. Improved support for templates to support attachments and fragments. New plugin hooks for providing custom loaders for both templates and fragments. See Long context support in LLM 0.24 using fragments and template plugins for more on this release.

The new llm-docs plugin demonstrates these new features. Install it like this:

llm install llm-docs

Now you can ask questions of the LLM documentation like this:

llm -f docs: 'How do I save a new template?'

The docs: prefix is registered by the plugin. The plugin fetches the LLM documentation for your installed version (from the docs-for-llms repository) and uses that as a prompt fragment to help answer your question.

Two more new plugins are llm-templates-github and llm-templates-fabric.

llm-templates-github lets you share and use templates on GitHub. You can run my Pelican riding a bicycle benchmark against a model like this:

llm install llm-templates-github
llm -t gh:simonw/pelican-svg -m o3-mini

This executes this pelican-svg.yaml template stored in my simonw/llm-templates repository, using a new repository naming convention.

To share your own templates, create a repository on GitHub under your user account called llm-templates and start saving .yaml files to it.

llm-templates-fabric provides a similar mechanism for loading templates from  Daniel Miessler's fabric collection:

llm install llm-templates-fabric
curl https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/6/only-miffy/ | \
  llm -t f:extract_main_idea

Major new features:

• New fragments feature. Fragments can be used to assemble long prompts from multiple existing pieces - URLs, file paths or previously used fragments. These will be stored de-duplicated in the database avoiding wasting space storing multiple long context pieces. Example usage: llm -f https://llm.datasette.io/robots.txt 'explain this file'. #617
• The llm logs file now accepts -f fragment references too, and will show just logged prompts that used those fragments.
• register_template_loaders() plugin hook allowing plugins to register new prefix:value custom template loaders. #809
• register_fragment_loaders() plugin hook allowing plugins to register new prefix:value custom fragment loaders. #886
• llm fragments family of commands for browsing fragments that have been previously logged to the database.
• The new llm-openai plugin provides support for o1-pro (which is not supported by the OpenAI mechanism used by LLM core). Future OpenAI features will migrate to this plugin instead of LLM core itself.

Improvements to templates:

• llm -t $URL option can now take a URL to a YAML template. #856
• Templates can now store default model options. #845
• Executing a template that does not use the $input variable no longer blocks LLM waiting for input, so prompt templates can now be used to try different models using llm -t pelican-svg -m model_id. #835
• llm templates command no longer crashes if one of the listed template files contains invalid YAML. #880
• Attachments can now be stored in templates. #826

Other changes:

• New llm models options family of commands for setting default options for particular models. #829
• llm logs list, llm schemas list and llm schemas show all now take a -d/--database option with an optional path to a SQLite database. They used to take -p/--path but that was inconsistent with other commands. -p/--path still works but is excluded from --help and will be removed in a future LLM release. #857
• llm logs -e/--expand option for expanding fragments. #881
• llm prompt -d path-to-sqlite.db option can now be used to write logs to a custom SQLite database. #858
• llm similar -p/--plain option providing more human-readable output than the default JSON. #853
• llm logs -s/--short now truncates to include the end of the prompt too. Thanks, Sukhbinder Singh. #759
• Set the Llm_raise_errors=1 environment variable to raise errors during prompts rather than suppressing them, which means you can run python -i -m llm 'prompt' and then drop into a debugger on errors with import pdb; pdb.pm(). #817
• Improved --help output for llm embed-multi. #824
• llm models -m X option which can be passed multiple times with model IDs to see the details of just those models. #825
• OpenAI models now accept PDF attachments. #834
• llm prompt -q gpt -q 4o option - pass -q searchterm one or more times to execute a prompt against the first model that matches all of those strings - useful for if you can't remember the full model ID. #841
• OpenAI compatible models configured using extra-openai-models.yaml now support supports_schema: true, vision: true and audio: true options. Thanks @adaitche and @giuli007. #819, #843

• New Fragments feature. #617
• register_fragment_loaders() plugin hook. #809

• Alpha release with experimental register_template_loaders() plugin hook. #809

Support for schemas, for getting supported models to output JSON that matches a specified JSON schema. See also Structured data extraction from unstructured content using LLM schemas for background on this feature. #776

• New llm prompt --schema '{JSON schema goes here} option for specifying a schema that should be used for the output from the model. The schemas documentation has more details and a tutorial.
• Schemas can also be defined using a concise schema specification, for example llm prompt --schema 'name, bio, age int'. #790
• Schemas can also be specified by passing a filename and through several other methods. #780
• New llm schemas family of commands: llm schemas list, llm schemas show, and llm schemas dsl for debugging the new concise schema language. #781
• Schemas can now be saved to templates using llm --schema X --save template-name or through modifying the template YAML. #778
• The llm logs command now has new options for extracting data collected using schemas: --data, --data-key, --data-array, --data-ids. #782
• New llm logs --id-gt X and --id-gte X options. #801
• New llm models --schemas option for listing models that support schemas. #797
• model.prompt(..., schema={...}) parameter for specifying a schema from Python. This accepts either a dictionary JSON schema definition or a Pydantic BaseModel subclass, see schemas in the Python API docs.
• The default OpenAI plugin now enables schemas across all supported models. Run llm models --schemas for a list of these.
• The llm-anthropic and llm-gemini plugins have been upgraded to add schema support for those models. Here's documentation on how to add schema support to a model plugin.

Other smaller changes:

• GPT-4.5 preview is now a supported model: llm -m gpt-4.5 'a joke about a pelican and a wolf' #795
• The prompt string is now optional when calling model.prompt() from the Python API, so model.prompt(attachments=llm.Attachment(url=url))) now works. #784
• extra-openai-models.yaml now supports a reasoning: true option. Thanks, Kasper Primdal Lauritzen. #766
• LLM now depends on Pydantic v2 or higher. Pydantic v1 is no longer supported. #520

See also LLM 0.22, the annotated release notes.

• Plugins that provide models that use API keys can now subclass the new llm.KeyModel and llm.AsyncKeyModel classes. This results in the API key being passed as a new key parameter to their .execute() methods, and means that Python users can pass a key as the model.prompt(..., key=) - see Passing an API key. Plugin developers should consult the new documentation on writing Models that accept API keys. #744
• New OpenAI model: chatgpt-4o-latest. This model ID accesses the current model being used to power ChatGPT, which can change without warning. #752
• New llm logs -s/--short flag, which returns a greatly shortened version of the matching log entries in YAML format with a truncated prompt and without including the response. #737
• Both llm models and llm embed-models now take multiple -q search fragments. You can now search for all models matching "gemini" and "exp" using llm models -q gemini -q exp. #748
• New llm embed-multi --prepend X option for prepending a string to each value before it is embedded - useful for models such as nomic-embed-text-v2-moe that require passages to start with a string like "search_document: ". #745
• The response.json() and response.usage() methods are now documented.
• Fixed a bug where conversations that were loaded from the database could not be continued using asyncio prompts. #742
• New plugin for macOS users: llm-mlx, which provides extremely high performance access to a wide range of local models using Apple's MLX framework.
• The llm-claude-3 plugin has been renamed to llm-anthropic.

• New model: o3-mini. #728
• The o3-mini and o1 models now support a reasoning_effort option which can be set to low, medium or high.
• llm prompt and llm logs now have a --xl/--extract-last option for extracting the last fenced code block in the response - a complement to the existing --x/--extract option. #717

• New model, o1. This model does not yet support streaming. #676
• o1-preview and o1-mini models now support streaming.
• New models, gpt-4o-audio-preview and gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview. #677

• llm prompt -x/--extract option, which returns just the content of the first fenced code block in the response. Try llm prompt -x 'Python function to reverse a string'. #681

  • Creating a template using llm ... --save x now supports the -x/--extract option, which is saved to the template. YAML templates can set this option using extract: true.
  • New llm logs -x/--extract option extracts the first fenced code block from matching logged responses.
• New llm models -q 'search' option returning models that case-insensitively match the search query. #700
• Installation documentation now also includes uv. Thanks, Ariel Marcus. #690 and #702
• llm models command now shows the current default model at the bottom of the listing. Thanks, Amjith Ramanujam. #688
• Plugin directory now includes llm-venice, llm-bedrock, llm-deepseek and llm-cmd-comp.
• Fixed bug where some dependency version combinations could cause a Client.__init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'proxies' error. #709
• OpenAI embedding models are now available using their full names of text-embedding-ada-002, text-embedding-3-small and text-embedding-3-large - the previous names are still supported as aliases. Thanks, web-sst. #654

• FIxed bug where llm.get_models() and llm.get_async_models() returned the same model multiple times. #667

• Tokens used by a response are now logged to new input_tokens and output_tokens integer columns and a token_details JSON string column, for the default OpenAI models and models from other plugins that implement this feature. #610
• llm prompt now takes a -u/--usage flag to display token usage at the end of the response.
• llm logs -u/--usage shows token usage information for logged responses.
• llm prompt ... --async responses are now logged to the database. #641
• llm.get_models() and llm.get_async_models() functions, documented here. #640
• response.usage() and async response await response.usage() methods, returning a Usage(input=2, output=1, details=None) dataclass. #644
• response.on_done(callback) and await response.on_done(callback) methods for specifying a callback to be executed when a response has completed, documented here. #653
• Fix for bug running llm chat on Windows 11. Thanks, Sukhbinder Singh. #495

• llm.get_models() and llm.get_async_models() functions, documented here. #640

• response.usage() and async response await response.usage() methods, returning a Usage(input=2, output=1, details=None) dataclass. #644

• Tokens used by a response are now logged to new input_tokens and output_tokens integer columns and a token_details JSON string column, for the default OpenAI models and models from other plugins that implement this feature. #610
• llm prompt now takes a -u/--usage flag to display token usage at the end of the response.
• llm logs -u/--usage shows token usage information for logged responses.
• llm prompt ... --async responses are now logged to the database. #641

• Initial support for async models. Plugins can now provide an AsyncModel subclass that can be accessed in the Python API using the new llm.get_async_model(model_id) method. See async models in the Python API docs and implementing async models in plugins. #507
• OpenAI models all now include async models, so function calls such as llm.get_async_model("gpt-4o-mini") will return an async model.
• gpt-4o-audio-preview model can be used to send audio attachments to the GPT-4o audio model. #608
• Attachments can now be sent without requiring a prompt. #611
• llm models --options now includes information on whether a model supports attachments. #612
• llm models --async shows available async models.
• Custom OpenAI-compatible models can now be marked as can_stream: false in the YAML if they do not support streaming. Thanks, Chris Mungall. #600
• Fixed bug where OpenAI usage data was incorrectly serialized to JSON. #614
• Standardized on audio/wav MIME type for audio attachments rather than audio/wave. #603

• Fixed bug where conversations did not work for async OpenAI models. #632
• __repr__ methods for Response and AsyncResponse.

Alpha support for async models. #507

Multiple smaller changes.

Support for attachments, allowing multi-modal models to accept images, audio, video and other formats. #578

The default OpenAI gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini models can both now be prompted with JPEG, GIF, PNG and WEBP images.

Attachments in the CLI can be URLs:

llm -m gpt-4o "describe this image" \
  -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg

Or file paths:

llm -m gpt-4o-mini "extract text" -a image1.jpg -a image2.jpg

Or binary data, which may need to use --attachment-type to specify the MIME type:

cat image | llm -m gpt-4o-mini "extract text" --attachment-type - image/jpeg

Attachments are also available in the Python API:

model = llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini")
response = model.prompt(
    "Describe these images",
    attachments=[
        llm.Attachment(path="pelican.jpg"),
        llm.Attachment(url="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans.jpg"),
    ]
)

Plugins that provide alternative models can support attachments, see Attachments for multi-modal models for details.

The latest llm-claude-3 plugin now supports attachments for Anthropic's Claude 3 and 3.5 models. The llm-gemini plugin supports attachments for Google's Gemini 1.5 models.

Also in this release: OpenAI models now record their "usage" data in the database even when the response was streamed. These records can be viewed using llm logs --json. #591

Alpha support for attachments. #578

• OpenAI models now use the internal self.get_key() mechanism, which means they can be used from Python code in a way that will pick up keys that have been configured using llm keys set or the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable. #552. This code now works correctly:

  import llm
  print(llm.get_model("gpt-4o-mini").prompt("hi"))

• New documented API methods: llm.get_default_model(), llm.set_default_model(alias), llm.get_default_embedding_model(alias), llm.set_default_embedding_model(). #553
• Support for OpenAI's new o1 family of preview models, llm -m o1-preview "prompt" and llm -m o1-mini "prompt". These models are currently only available to tier 5 OpenAI API users, though this may change in the future. #570

• Support for OpenAI's new GPT-4o mini model: llm -m gpt-4o-mini 'rave about pelicans in French' #536
• gpt-4o-mini is now the default model if you do not specify your own default, replacing GPT-3.5 Turbo. GPT-4o mini is both cheaper and better than GPT-3.5 Turbo.
• Fixed a bug where llm logs -q 'flourish' -m haiku could not combine both the -q search query and the -m model specifier. #515

• Support for OpenAI's new GPT-4o model: llm -m gpt-4o 'say hi in Spanish' #490
• The gpt-4-turbo alias is now a model ID, which indicates the latest version of OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo text and image model. Your existing logs.db database may contain records under the previous model ID of gpt-4-turbo-preview. #493
• New llm logs -r/--response option for outputting just the last captured response, without wrapping it in Markdown and accompanying it with the prompt. #431

• Nine new plugins since version 0.13:

  • llm-claude-3 supporting Anthropic's Claude 3 family of models.
  • llm-command-r supporting Cohere's Command R and Command R Plus API models.
  • llm-reka supports the Reka family of models via their API.
  • llm-perplexity by Alexandru Geana supporting the Perplexity Labs API models, including llama-3-sonar-large-32k-online which can search for things online and llama-3-70b-instruct.
  • llm-groq by Moritz Angermann providing access to fast models hosted by Groq.
  • llm-fireworks supporting models hosted by Fireworks AI.
  • llm-together adds support for the Together AI extensive family of hosted openly licensed models.
  • llm-embed-onnx provides seven embedding models that can be executed using the ONNX model framework.
  • llm-cmd accepts a prompt for a shell command, runs that prompt and populates the result in your shell so you can review it, edit it and then hit <enter> to execute or ctrl+c to cancel, see this post for details.

• Fix for No module named 'readline' error on Windows. #407

See also LLM 0.13: The annotated release notes.

• Added support for new OpenAI embedding models: 3-small and 3-large and three variants of those with different dimension sizes, 3-small-512, 3-large-256 and 3-large-1024. See OpenAI embedding models for details. #394
• The default gpt-4-turbo model alias now points to gpt-4-turbo-preview, which uses the most recent OpenAI GPT-4 turbo model (currently gpt-4-0125-preview). #396
• New OpenAI model aliases gpt-4-1106-preview and gpt-4-0125-preview.
• OpenAI models now support a -o json_object 1 option which will cause their output to be returned as a valid JSON object. #373
• New plugins since the last release include llm-mistral, llm-gemini, llm-ollama and llm-bedrock-meta.
• The keys.json file for storing API keys is now created with 600 file permissions. #351
• Documented a pattern for installing plugins that depend on PyTorch using the Homebrew version of LLM, despite Homebrew using Python 3.12 when PyTorch have not yet released a stable package for that Python version. #397
• Underlying OpenAI Python library has been upgraded to >1.0. It is possible this could cause compatibility issues with LLM plugins that also depend on that library. #325
• Arrow keys now work inside the llm chat command. #376
• LLM_OPENAI_SHOW_RESPONSES=1 environment variable now outputs much more detailed information about the HTTP request and response made to OpenAI (and OpenAI-compatible) APIs. #404
• Dropped support for Python 3.7.

• Support for the new GPT-4 Turbo model from OpenAI. Try it using llm chat -m gpt-4-turbo or llm chat -m 4t. #323
• New -o seed 1 option for OpenAI models which sets a seed that can attempt to evaluate the prompt deterministically. #324

• Pin to version of OpenAI Python library prior to 1.0 to avoid breaking. #327

• Fixed a bug where llm embed -c "text" did not correctly pick up the configured default embedding model. #317
• New plugins: llm-python, llm-bedrock-anthropic and llm-embed-jina (described in Execute Jina embeddings with a CLI using llm-embed-jina).
• llm-gpt4all now uses the new GGUF model format. simonw/llm-gpt4all#16

LLM now supports the new OpenAI gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct model, and OpenAI completion (as opposed to chat completion) models in general. #284

llm -m gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct 'Reasons to tame a wild beaver:'

OpenAI completion models like this support a -o logprobs 3 option, which accepts a number between 1 and 5 and will include the log probabilities (for each produced token, what were the top 3 options considered by the model) in the logged response.

llm -m gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct 'Say hello succinctly' -o logprobs 3

You can then view the logprobs that were recorded in the SQLite logs database like this:

sqlite-utils "$(llm logs path)" \
  'select * from responses order by id desc limit 1' | \
  jq '.[0].response_json' -r | jq

Truncated output looks like this:

  [
    {
      "text": "Hi",
      "top_logprobs": [
        {
          "Hi": -0.13706253,
          "Hello": -2.3714375,
          "Hey": -3.3714373
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "text": " there",
      "top_logprobs": [
        {
          " there": -0.96057636,
          "!\"": -0.5855763,
          ".\"": -3.2574513
        }
      ]
    }
  ]

Also in this release:

• The llm.user_dir() function, used by plugins, now ensures the directory exists before returning it. #275
• New LLM_OPENAI_SHOW_RESPONSES=1 environment variable for displaying the full HTTP response returned by OpenAI compatible APIs. #286
• The llm embed-multi command now has a --batch-size X option for setting the batch size to use when processing embeddings - useful if you have limited memory available. #273
• The collection.embed_multi() method also now accepts an optional batch_size=int argument.
• Fixed two bugs with llm embed-multi --files relating to handling of directories. Thanks, ealvar3z. #274, #280

The two major features in this release are the llm chat command and support for embedding binary data.

See Build an image search engine with llm-clip, chat with models with llm chat for more background on these features.

The new llm chat command starts an ongoing chat conversation with a model in your terminal. It works with all models supported by LLM and its plugins, including locally installed models such as Llama 2. #231

This offers a big performance boost for local models, since they don't need to be freshly loaded into memory for each prompt.

Here's an example chat with Llama 2 13B, provided by the llm-mlc plugin.

llm chat -m mlc-chat-Llama-2-13b-chat-hf-q4f16_1

This starts a chat session:

Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
Type '!edit' to open your default editor and modify the prompt.
> Who are you?
Hello! I'm just an AI, here to assist you with any questions you may have.
My name is LLaMA, and I'm a large language model trained to provide helpful
and informative responses to a wide range of questions and topics. I'm here
to help you find the information you need, while ensuring a safe and
respectful conversation. Please feel free to ask me anything, and I'll do my
best to provide a helpful and accurate response.
> Tell me a joke about otters
Sure, here's a joke about otters:

Why did the otter go to the party?

Because he heard it was a "whale" of a time!

(Get it? Whale, like a big sea mammal, but also a "wild" or "fun" time.
Otters are known for their playful and social nature, so it's a lighthearted
and silly joke.)

I hope that brought a smile to your face! Do you have any other questions or
topics you'd like to discuss?
> exit

Chat sessions are logged to SQLite - use llm logs to view them. They can accept system prompts, templates and model options - consult the chat documentation for details.

LLM's embeddings feature has been expanded to provide support for embedding binary data, in addition to text. #254

This enables models like CLIP, supported by the new llm-clip plugin.

CLIP is a multi-modal embedding model which can embed images and text into the same vector space. This means you can use it to create an embedding index of photos, and then search for the embedding vector for "a happy dog" and get back images that are semantically closest to that string.

To create embeddings for every JPEG in a directory stored in a photos collection, run:

llm install llm-clip
llm embed-multi photos --files photos/ '*.jpg' --binary -m clip

Now you can search for photos of raccoons using:

llm similar photos -c 'raccoon'

This spits out a list of images, ranked by how similar they are to the string "raccoon":

{"id": "IMG_4801.jpeg", "score": 0.28125139257127457, "content": null, "metadata": null}
{"id": "IMG_4656.jpeg", "score": 0.26626441704164294, "content": null, "metadata": null}
{"id": "IMG_2944.jpeg", "score": 0.2647445926996852, "content": null, "metadata": null}
...

• The LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS environment variable can be used to control which plugins are loaded when llm starts running. #256
• The llm plugins --all option includes builtin plugins in the list of plugins. #259
• The llm embed-db family of commands has been renamed to llm collections. #229
• llm embed-multi --files now has an --encoding option and defaults to falling back to latin-1 if a file cannot be processed as utf-8. #225

• Support for embedding binary data. #254
• llm chat now works for models with API keys. #247
• llm chat -o for passing options to a model. #244
• llm chat --no-stream option. #248
• LLM_LOAD_PLUGINS environment variable. #256
• llm plugins --all option for including builtin plugins. #259
• llm embed-db has been renamed to llm collections. #229
• Fixed bug where llm embed -c option was treated as a filepath, not a string. Thanks, mhalle. #263

• New llm chat command for starting an interactive terminal chat with a model. #231
• llm embed-multi --files now has an --encoding option and defaults to falling back to latin-1 if a file cannot be processed as utf-8. #225

The big new feature in this release is support for embeddings. See LLM now provides tools for working with embeddings for additional details.

Embedding models take a piece of text - a word, sentence, paragraph or even a whole article, and convert that into an array of floating point numbers. #185

This embedding vector can be thought of as representing a position in many-dimensional-space, where the distance between two vectors represents how semantically similar they are to each other within the content of a language model.

Embeddings can be used to find related documents, and also to implement semantic search - where a user can search for a phrase and get back results that are semantically similar to that phrase even if they do not share any exact keywords.

LLM now provides both CLI and Python APIs for working with embeddings. Embedding models are defined by plugins, so you can install additional models using the plugins mechanism.

The first two embedding models supported by LLM are:

• OpenAI's ada-002 embedding model, available via an inexpensive API if you set an OpenAI key using llm keys set openai.
• The sentence-transformers family of models, available via the new llm-sentence-transformers plugin.

See Embedding with the CLI for detailed instructions on working with embeddings using LLM.

The new commands for working with embeddings are:

• llm embed - calculate embeddings for content and return them to the console or store them in a SQLite database.
• llm embed-multi - run bulk embeddings for multiple strings, using input from a CSV, TSV or JSON file, data from a SQLite database or data found by scanning the filesystem. #215
• llm similar - run similarity searches against your stored embeddings - starting with a search phrase or finding content related to a previously stored vector. #190
• llm embed-models - list available embedding models.
• llm embed-db - commands for inspecting and working with the default embeddings SQLite database.

There's also a new llm.Collection class for creating and searching collections of embedding from Python code, and a llm.get_embedding_model() interface for embedding strings directly. #191

• Fixed bug where first prompt would show an error if the io.datasette.llm directory had not yet been created. #193
• Updated documentation to recommend a different llm-gpt4all model since the one we were using is no longer available. #195

• The output format for llm logs has changed. Previously it was JSON - it's now a much more readable Markdown format suitable for pasting into other documents. #160

  • The new llm logs --json option can be used to get the old JSON format.
  • Pass llm logs --conversation ID or --cid ID to see the full logs for a specific conversation.
• You can now combine piped input and a prompt in a single command: cat script.py | llm 'explain this code'. This works even for models that do not support system prompts. #153
• Additional OpenAI-compatible models can now be configured with custom HTTP headers. This enables platforms such as openrouter.ai to be used with LLM, which can provide Claude access even without an Anthropic API key.
• Keys set in keys.json are now used in preference to environment variables. #158
• The documentation now includes a plugin directory listing all available plugins for LLM. #173
• New related tools section in the documentation describing ttok, strip-tags and symbex. #111
• The llm models, llm aliases and llm templates commands now default to running the same command as llm models list and llm aliases list and llm templates list. #167
• New llm keys (aka llm keys list) command for listing the names of all configured keys. #174
• Two new Python API functions, llm.set_alias(alias, model_id) and llm.remove_alias(alias) can be used to configure aliases from within Python code. #154
• LLM is now compatible with both Pydantic 1 and Pydantic 2. This means you can install llm as a Python dependency in a project that depends on Pydantic 1 without running into dependency conflicts. Thanks, Chris Mungall. #147
• llm.get_model(model_id) is now documented as raising llm.UnknownModelError if the requested model does not exist. #155

• Fixed a bug where some users would see an AlterError: No such column: log.id error when attempting to use this tool, after upgrading to the latest sqlite-utils 3.35 release. #162

The new Model aliases commands can be used to configure additional aliases for models, for example:

llm aliases set turbo gpt-3.5-turbo-16k

Now you can run the 16,000 token gpt-3.5-turbo-16k model like this:

llm -m turbo 'An epic Greek-style saga about a cheesecake that builds a SQL database from scratch'

Use llm aliases list to see a list of aliases and llm aliases remove turbo to remove one again. #151

• llm-mlc can run local models released by the MLC project, including models that can take advantage of the GPU on Apple Silicon M1/M2 devices.
• llm-llama-cpp uses llama.cpp to run models published in the GGML format. See Run Llama 2 on your own Mac using LLM and Homebrew for more details.

• OpenAI models now have min and max validation on their floating point options. Thanks, Pavel Král. #115
• Fix for bug where llm templates list raised an error if a template had an empty prompt. Thanks, Sherwin Daganato. #132
• Fixed bug in llm install --editable option which prevented installation of .[test]. #136
• llm install --no-cache-dir and --force-reinstall options. #146

• LLM can now be installed directly from Homebrew core: brew install llm. #124
• Python API documentation now covers System prompts.
• Fixed incorrect example in the Templates documentation. Thanks, Jorge Cabello. #125

• Models hosted on Replicate can now be accessed using the llm-replicate plugin, including the new Llama 2 model from Meta AI. More details here: Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the llm-replicate plugin.
• Model providers that expose an API that is compatible with the OpenAPI API format, including self-hosted model servers such as LocalAI, can now be accessed using additional configuration for the default OpenAI plugin. #106
• OpenAI models that are not yet supported by LLM can also be configured using the new extra-openai-models.yaml configuration file. #107
• The llm logs command now accepts a -m model_id option to filter logs to a specific model. Aliases can be used here in addition to model IDs. #108
• Logs now have a SQLite full-text search index against their prompts and responses, and the llm logs -q SEARCH option can be used to return logs that match a search term. #109

LLM now supports additional language models, thanks to a new plugins mechanism for installing additional models.

Plugins are available for 19 models in addition to the default OpenAI ones:

• llm-gpt4all adds support for 17 models that can download and run on your own device, including Vicuna, Falcon and wizardLM.
• llm-mpt30b adds support for the MPT-30B model, a 19GB download.
• llm-palm adds support for Google's PaLM 2 via the Google API.

A comprehensive tutorial, writing a plugin to support a new model describes how to add new models by building plugins in detail.

• Python API documentation for using LLM models, including models from plugins, directly from Python. #75
• Messages are now logged to the database by default - no need to run the llm init-db command any more, which has been removed. Instead, you can toggle this behavior off using llm logs off or turn it on again using llm logs on. The llm logs status command shows the current status of the log database. If logging is turned off, passing --log to the llm prompt command will cause that prompt to be logged anyway. #98
• New database schema for logged messages, with conversations and responses tables. If you have previously used the old logs table it will continue to exist but will no longer be written to. #91
• New -o/--option name value syntax for setting options for models, such as temperature. Available options differ for different models. #63
• llm models list --options command for viewing all available model options. #82
• llm "prompt" --save template option for saving a prompt directly to a template. #55
• Prompt templates can now specify default values for parameters. Thanks,  Chris Mungall. #57
• llm openai models command to list all available OpenAI models from their API. #70
• llm models default MODEL_ID to set a different model as the default to be used when llm is run without the -m/--model option. #31

• llm -s is now a shortcut for llm --system. #69
• llm -m 4-32k alias for gpt-4-32k.
• llm install -e directory command for installing a plugin from a local directory.
• The LLM_USER_PATH environment variable now controls the location of the directory in which LLM stores its data. This replaces the old LLM_KEYS_PATH and LLM_LOG_PATH and LLM_TEMPLATES_PATH variables. #76
• Documentation covering Utility functions for plugins.
• Documentation site now uses Plausible for analytics. #79

• LLM can now be installed using Homebrew: brew install simonw/llm/llm. #50
• llm is now styled LLM in the documentation. #45
• Examples in documentation now include a copy button. #43
• llm templates command no longer has its display disrupted by newlines. #42
• llm templates command now includes system prompt, if set. #44

This release includes some backwards-incompatible changes:

• The -4 option for GPT-4 is now -m 4.
• The --code option has been removed.
• The -s option has been removed as streaming is now the default. Use --no-stream to opt out of streaming.

Templates is a new feature that allows prompts to be saved as templates and re-used with different variables.

Templates can be created using the llm templates edit command:

llm templates edit summarize

Templates are YAML - the following template defines summarization using a system prompt:

system: Summarize this text

The template can then be executed like this:

cat myfile.txt | llm -t summarize

Templates can include both system prompts, regular prompts and indicate the model they should use. They can reference variables such as $input for content piped to the tool, or other variables that are passed using the new -p/--param option.

This example adds a voice parameter:

system: Summarize this text in the voice of $voice

Then to run it (via strip-tags to remove HTML tags from the input):

curl -s 'https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/imovie-slides-and-audio' | \
  strip-tags -m | llm -t summarize -p voice GlaDOS

Example output:

The Templates documentation provides more detailed examples.

You can now use llm to continue a previous conversation with the OpenAI chat models (gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4). This will include your previous prompts and responses in the prompt sent to the API, allowing the model to continue within the same context.

Use the new -c/--continue option to continue from the previous message thread:

llm "Pretend to be a witty gerbil, say hi briefly"

llm "What do you think of snacks?" -c

The -c option will continue from the most recent logged message.

To continue a different chat, pass an integer ID to the --chat option. This should be the ID of a previously logged message. You can find these IDs using the llm logs command.

Thanks Amjith Ramanujam for contributing to this feature. #6

API keys for language models such as those by OpenAI can now be saved using the new llm keys family of commands.

To set the default key to be used for the OpenAI APIs, run this:

llm keys set openai

Then paste in your API key.

Keys can also be passed using the new --key command line option - this can be a full key or the alias of a key that has been previously stored.

See API key management for more. #13

The logs.db database that stores a history of executed prompts no longer lives at ~/.llm/log.db - it can now be found in a location that better fits the host operating system, which can be seen using:

llm logs path

On macOS this is ~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/logs.db.

To open that database using Datasette, run this:

datasette "$(llm logs path)"

You can upgrade your existing installation by copying your database to the new location like this:

cp ~/.llm/log.db "$(llm logs path)"
rm -rf ~/.llm # To tidy up the now obsolete directory

The database schema has changed, and will be updated automatically the first time you run the command.

That schema is included in the documentation. #35

• New llm logs --truncate option (shortcut -t) which truncates the displayed prompts to make the log output easier to read. #16
• Documentation now spans multiple pages and lives at https://llm.datasette.io/ #21
• Default llm chatgpt command has been renamed to llm prompt. #17
• Removed --code option in favour of new prompt templates mechanism. #24
• Responses are now streamed by default, if the model supports streaming. The -s/--stream option has been removed. A new --no-stream option can be used to opt-out of streaming.  #25
• The -4/--gpt4 option has been removed in favour of -m 4 or -m gpt4, using a new mechanism that allows models to have additional short names.
• The new gpt-3.5-turbo-16k model with a 16,000 token context length can now also be accessed using -m chatgpt-16k or -m 3.5-16k. Thanks, Benjamin Kirkbride. #37
• Improved display of error messages from OpenAI. #15

• llm logs command for browsing logs of previously executed completions. #3
• llm "Python code to output factorial 10" --code option which sets a system prompt designed to encourage code to be output without any additional explanatory text. #5
• Tool can now accept a prompt piped directly to standard input. #11

• If a SQLite database exists in ~/.llm/log.db all prompts and responses are logged to that file. The llm init-db command can be used to create this file. #2

• Initial prototype release. #1