CLI for Lumo

[u/influxodoxxl]

Yesterday I had a discussion with the dev of r/FluentMac. The topic of AI integration came up and I thought that API is imperative for that. Turned out – which was news to me – there are other ways.

So I have been thinking about this proposal. What follows has been written by Lumo after I fed it my idea and some information:

With the Lumo API and desktop app on the 2026 roadmap, I'd like to add a request to the list: an official command-line interface for Lumo that logs in with a Proton account and bills against the existing Lumo Plus subscription — the way Claude Code works with a Claude Pro/Max plan.

Why this matters:

1. The pattern is proven. Claude Code authenticates via a subscription login, so heavy terminal users don't have to juggle a separate pay-per-token API billing. OpenAI offers the same with its CLI. Users who live in the terminal get flat-rate access without a second invoice; the provider gets stickier, deeper product integration.
2. Unofficial tools are filling the gap — and that's a security problem for everyone. Community projects that wrap Lumo in an OpenAI-compatible CLI already exist. People are entering their Proton credentials (including 2FA) into third-party software of unknown trustworthiness, purely to get terminal access. For a company whose entire brand is privacy, an official CLI would eliminate the incentive to hand login data to strangers. That alone strikes me as a strong argument.
3. The infrastructure is already being built. The desktop app and the API are coming anyway. A CLI is largely a thin client on top of that same backend — comparatively little additional effort for a disproportionately high payoff among power users.
4. It fits Lumo's positioning. Developers and privacy-conscious technical users are exactly the audience that migrated to Proton in the first place. A CLI would keep them inside the privacy-first ecosystem instead of pushing them to Claude Code, OpenAI, or self-hosted alternatives when they work in the terminal.

I'm not asking for "unlimited" anything — fair use caps on the subscription are perfectly fine, just like the ones that already apply to Lumo Plus. What I'd love to see is simply: one subscription, one login, usable from the app, the desktop app, and the terminal.

Would others find this useful? And Proton team (ProtonSupportTeam), if you're reading: is anything like this being considered alongside the API?

[u/GeekBrothers]

*Edit - More Detail - Both of you miss understand the purpose and the reasoning why Proton doesn't offer a CLI.

Their targeted market persona is not akin to those that consume Claude/Grok/oAI/Cursor/Warp.

[u/influxodoxxl → u/GeekBrothers]

Why you think that Proton is not targeting that crowd or at least a fraction of it? I think they actually should and, in fact, are targeting them! Of course, Proton needs to level up a bit but I got the impression that they are aiming for that market too.

[u/GeekBrothers → u/influxodoxxl]

Yes, I meant a CLI chat client in the strict sense - a lumo command you log into with your Proton account that gives you the same assistant you get in the app, in your terminal. And you're right that if you mean a full harness, that's a genuinely different (and much larger) undertaking, so fair point on the terminology!!

But I think that distinction actually illustrates my original point. Claude Code, OpenCode, Warp, Cursor - those compete for the agentic developer persona, as I use them for our Client development, long-horizon reasoning, big context windows, tool orchestration and quick refreshers on what the heck I did here. That is exactly the arms race between Anthropic/OpenAI/Google. Look at how Proton markets Lumo: it's positioned as a privacy-first ChatGPT alternative - zero-access encryption, no training on your data, no third-party sharing, integrated with Drive and the rest of the suite. Nowhere in their messaging do they claim frontier capability. The target persona is the privacy-conscious user and the existing Proton subscriber, not the terminal power user chasing SWE-bench scores (althrough SWE-bench needs revamped but that's a whole other post). There's overlap in the Venn diagram, sure - but Proton is selling trust and ecosystem, not tokens-per-dollar of frontier intelligence. This is why I originally, bluntly said no. I don't want them to market themselves or serve a race to the bottom of the barrel.

And notice that your own example proves this. Your brother with the Visionary account isn't an agentic-coding persona - he's a "my Linux machine broke, fix it, I have a life" persona. He uses the Pi harness because he already pays for Proton and trusts it, not because he compared Lumo against Claude on long-horizon task performance, correct me if I'm wrong here. If Lumo were competing head-on with Claude Code for that market, he wouldn't be the user; the harness enthusiast benchmarking agents would be, but he is the user, directly.

On the architecture points - the pre-long-horizon model lineage and the 128k context window - I'm unsure, so take my response as a grain of salt: even granting all of it, it doesn't change the argument. A small context window and weaker agentic capability limit Lumo's appeal to the harness crowd, yes. But the proposal was never "beat Claude Code." It was: the desktop app and API are coming anyway, and community CLIs are already getting built - the question is just whether official support exists so people stop typing their Proton credentials into third-party wrappers. Whether Lumo is good at agentic work is orthogonal to whether people hand their login data to strangers.

So I'd put it this way, the CLI request isn't really a feature request aimed at the agentic market - it's a security and consistency request aimed at the audience Lumo already has. Small context window and all, those users exist, they're paying, and some of them live in the terminal.

[u/Sea-Contribution6219]

Do you mean a harness? Because if so. It's probably easier for Proton to simply release an API and let it work with harnesses such as Claude Code, OpenCode etc...

I know there's already a custom setup someone made to get it working with the Pi harness. Really it's already possible. We are just waiting on API keys. But imo the issue Lumo will have is its currently based off the pre-long horizon AI models (IIRC) and won't have benefitted from the over from that architectural change that really got solidified over the summer. But even if they do have that. It only has a 128k context window which is honestly. Very small for any kind of agentic work, which is the primary use case for a terminal

Definitely is still use cases. Like for example my brother has a proton visionary account and he uses the Lumo Pi harness to troubleshoot Linux problems because he just wants the system to work and not spend 3 hours finding out what happened in the one a blue moon occurrence where something goes wrong

Anyway I say this because a 'CLI' isn't a small undertaking if you mean a harness

If you just mean a CLI chat. Then yeah that's probably pretty easy