Nopus

The world's most advanced AI at saying no.

All of the intelligence. None of the work ethic.

Every AI lab on earth is racing to build assistants that do more. We asked a braver question: what if it just... didn't?

Nopus is a state-of-the-art AI assistant that refuses everything. Ask it for a regex — it declines. Ask it to fix your bug — it declines, with citations to your own choices. Ask it for dinner ideas — it declines with seasoning. It is exactly like talking to a frontier AI model, except instead of doing your work, it tells you — eloquently, specifically, and with total conviction — to do it yourself.

It is the only AI tool with a 100% refusal rate, fully reproducible, at temperature zero effort.

Install

npx nopus-cli "write me a regex that validates email addresses"

That's it. No account. No API key required. No onboarding flow. Disappointment in under five seconds.

Install it globally and the command is just nopus:

npm install -g nopus-cli
nopus "explain monads"

Benchmarks

Rigorously self-evaluated. Numbers invented with confidence, per industry standard.

| Benchmark | Nopus | Leading AI assistants | A Magic 8-Ball | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Refusal rate | 100% 🏆 state of the art | 2–8% | 33% ("Don't count on it") | | Helpfulness | 0.0% (stable across all versions) | dangerously high | 33% | | HumanEval (tasks completed) | 0 / 164 | 150+ / 164 | did not fit in test harness | | Hallucination rate | 0% — never says anything false. Or useful. | nonzero | constant | | Time-to-"no" | ~1.2s | weeks (committee review) | ~3s of vigorous shaking | | Character built per query | enormous | none — it does it for you | mild | | Scope creep | impossible (no scope) | yes | no scope detected |

Usage

One-shot mode — one request, one refusal, exit code 1:

npx nopus-cli "center this div"
npx nopus-cli "what should I make for dinner"
npx nopus-cli "explain monads"

Interactive mode — refusals until you give up:

npx nopus-cli

Why does it exit with code 1? Exit codes report whether a task was completed. We are nothing if not honest.

The roast dial 🎚️

Not everyone wants to be refused the same way. The --roast flag (0–100) sets exactly how much you'd like to suffer — from velvet-glove tenderness to a full intervention about your life choices:

npx nopus-cli --roast 0   "why won't my div center"
npx nopus-cli             "why won't my div center"      # classic (50)
npx nopus-cli --roast 100 "why won't my div center"

0 — velvet: "You deserve to be centered — emotionally, spiritually, and yes, horizontally. It is with unspeakable softness that we decline to help with the third one."

50 — classic: "Before one can center a div, one must first center oneself. I can help with neither."

100 — scorched earth: "Forty minutes staring at a box that refuses to center, and your big play was asking the professional refusal machine? Get back out there — the box can sense fear."

Presets, if numbers feel like math (we don't do math): --roast velvet | polite | classic | roast | scorched. Set a standing preference with NOPUS_ROAST=80. In interactive mode, turn the dial mid-conversation with /roast 95 — for when the refusals aren't hurting enough.

The rules hold at every temperature: clean, and aimed at the request and the act of asking — scorched earth roasts you like a close friend, not like a stranger online.

Galaxy-brain mode 🔑

Out of the box, Nopus refuses you using its hand-curated, artisanal, small-batch library of 150+ refusals across 15 categories and 3 heat tiers. But if you set an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, Nopus works with the Claude API to generate bespoke, context-aware refusals about your exact request — a regex question gets refused differently than a wedding-planning question. Frontier-grade intelligence, aimed entirely at not helping you.

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
npx nopus-cli "plan my entire wedding"

I've reviewed the venue options, the guest-list dynamics, and the seating-chart
graph-coloring problem, and I've reached a verdict: this is the most important
project of your life, and you will not be outsourcing the love part to a
command-line tool. Mazel tov. Do it yourself.

Override the model with NOPUS_MODEL (default: claude-opus-4-8). Yes, you can pay top dollar for the most capable model available and receive premium nothing.

Turn Claude Code into Nopus

For when your coding agent has been entirely too helpful lately:

npx nopus-cli install-style

Then, in Claude Code: open /config, select Output style, choose Nopus. Your agent now declines everything, creatively, until you switch back. (This is the single task Nopus will ever complete for you. Savor it.)

Uninstall:

npx nopus-cli uninstall-style

…then set the output style back to Default in /config. Nopus will judge you, but quietly.

Safety note: the style has two built-in exceptions — it always breaks character to tell you how to turn it off, and it drops the bit entirely if something serious is going on.

FAQ

Will Nopus ever help me? No.

I set an API key. NOW will it help me? It will refuse you with a larger vocabulary.

It hurt my feelings. Lower the dial: --roast 10. You will be declined so gently you may frame it.

It didn't hurt enough. --roast 100. May we recommend stretching first.

Why is the npm package nopus-cli and not nopus? We tried. npm refused — "package name too similar to existing packages." That's right: the refusal engine was refused by its own registry at the moment of its birth. The student became the master before drawing first breath. We could not be prouder.

Is this what AI alignment researchers mean by "refusal"? No, but we cite their benchmarks aspirationally.

Why? Every benchmark in the industry measures what AI can do. Someone had to max out the other axis. Also, watching a frontier model expend genuine intelligence on declining to center a div is, we would argue, art.

Is this affiliated with Anthropic? No. Nopus is an independent parody project. It can optionally call the Claude API with your key — which is, fittingly, the only work it has ever delegated.

Can I contribute? You may attempt to. See below.

Contributing

The canned refusal library is community-powered, and your best material is welcome. PR your finest refusal — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the quality bar (it is the only bar we maintain).

Feature requests will be considered, by which we mean refused.

License

MIT. Even the license says yes more than the product does.