Show HN: Decide – Jev decisions in the shell, scripts, and agent skills (github.com)

A decision model takes context and questions with a fixed set of choices, and returns answers with a calibrated probability. No prose, nothing to parse. Decision models are 200x faster and 400x cheaper than LLMs making comparable judgements.

I wanted to play around with decision models in more places and without writing code or manually calling APIs. I wanted scripts to read like natural language and agents to be able to pick up the tool and use it after simply reading the help output.

  brew install vsekhar/tap/decide
  decide --set-config --model typesafe:jev-latest --api-key
  API key: <paste your API key>

  decide "Is Atlanta the capital of Georgia?"
  yes

  # Choose from among options
  decide "What kind of weather is typical in Florida?" \
      --option rainy \
      --option sunny \
      --option snowy
  sunny

  # Provide context (32k context window)
  decide --context @ticket.txt \
      "Which team handles this ticket?" \
        --option shipping \
        --option billing \
        --option returns
  billing

  # Pick a level, least to most, explain each to the model
  decide --context @ticket.txt \
      "How urgent is this ticket?" \
        --level not_urgent="Customer feedback or feature request" \
        --level somewhat_urgent="Customer problem, not blocked" \
        --level urgent="Customer blocked"
  somewhat_urgent

  # Multiple questions in one call, name questions for easier parsing
  decide --context @ticket.txt \
      "Which team handles this ticket?" \
        --name team \
        --option shipping \
        --option billing \
        --option returns \
      "How urgent is this ticket?" \
        --level not_urgent \
        --level somewhat_urgent \
        --level urgent \
      "Should we issue a refund?"
  team=billing
  somewhat_urgent
  yes

  # Script-friendly exit codes
  if decide --context "$body" "Is this message spam?" -q; then
    mv "$file" spam/
  fi

- Confidence: gate on the model's confidence in its answer with --min-confidence and --fallback

- Question files: load questions from a file, useful for detailed questionnaires under version control

- Scriptable: 0 is decided or yes, 1 is no, 2 is unsure, 10 is your mistake, 11 is network/model problem

- Agent skill: agents can get cursory information about files quickly and cheaply before or instead of reading them (example skill included in the repo) - token efficient, no MCP

- Statistics and distribution: output the model's confidence and probabilities across your choices

- JSON: read context as JSON objects, write decisions as JSON objects

- Streaming: decide once per line from stdin using --each (for JSONL pipelines)

- Economical: two orders of magnitude cheaper than LLMs (Jev: $0.042/Mtok input, free output)

- Fast: typical latency of 200ms end-to-end (400 token context with 5 questions)

- Scalable: unlimited questions per call, processed in parallel

Limitations:

- Typesafe or OpenRouter API key required

- macOS 26+ pre-built via Homebrew; macOS 15 and Linux build from source (requires Swift 6.2)

- Jev only (so far the only publicly available decision model)

See also:

- DecisionModels (https://github.com/vsekhar/DecisionModels): Swift library for static and dynamic decision model calls, inspired by Apple's FoundationModels library, and powering decide.

- llm-typesafe (https://github.com/simonw/llm-typesafe): JSON-oriented input and output, integrated into the general purpose (and very popular) llm command by simonw which is written ...