claupe

A headless wrapper around the claude TUI for programmatic use.

Claude has recently introduced limits on the programmatic use of claude -p, which can get expensive fast. claupe allows you to use the claude TUI in a headless way, so your requests still bill against your interactive subscription instead. It's ideal for cron jobs, one-off scripts, and any time you want to quickly get an answer from claude without leaving the terminal.

How to use it

Install it globally using:

npm install -g claupe

Then you can run:

claupe "<prompt>"                            # positional prompt
git diff | claupe "review"                   # stdin is appended to the prompt
claupe -p "<prompt>"                         # -p accepted for muscle memory

Each invocation is a fresh claude conversation. You can use claupe in scripts, cron jobs, or just for quick questions in the terminal.

Configuration

| Variable | Default | Purpose | | -------------------------- | --------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | | CLAUPE_FIFO_DIR | $TMPDIR | Where per-request FIFOs are created | | CLAUPE_CLAUDE_BIN | claude | Path to the claude binary | | CLAUPE_READY_IDLE_MS | 800 | PTY-idle window before pasting the envelope | | CLAUPE_READY_MAX_WAIT_MS | 30000 | Max wait for the PTY to ever go idle | | CLAUPE_TIMEOUT_MS | 300000 | Max wait for claude to respond after paste | | CLAUPE_BOOT_DELAY_MS | 0 | If set, use this fixed sleep instead of idle detection |

Caveats

• Every call cold-starts claude (~3s). Fine for cron and one-shot scripts; bad for tight loops.
• --dangerously-skip-permissions is required so claude can run the callback unattended. Only run claupe in workspaces where that's acceptable.
• No defense against prompt injection in piped stdin. If you cat untrusted.txt | claupe ... and the file contains adversarial instructions, claude may follow them. With --dangerously-skip-permissions that includes shell commands. Only pipe content you trust.
• The interactive/programmatic split is Anthropic's call, not a hard technical line. If they later decide to flag TUI traffic that comes from a PTY without a real human, this trick stops working.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.