Our take
Inactiveno commits in over a year- Activity
- 20
- Community
- 31
- Issues
- 21
- Pull requests
- 21
-4 stars in the last 17 days
simpleaichat offers a compact, practical interface to OpenAI chat models, but its inactive maintenance and highly concentrated contribution history make it a cautious choice for new dependencies.
Good fit if
- You specifically need a small Python interface to OpenAI chat models, including streaming, tool calls, or schema-based output.
- You can evaluate and maintain the dependency yourself, and are comfortable with its MIT license.
- Your use case can be implemented with Python and an OpenAI API key.
Look elsewhere if
- You need a project with recent commits, releases, or active issue handling. The repository has had no commits or releases in over a year, and no issues have been closed recently.
- Your team needs ongoing maintenance shared broadly across contributors. Most of the code contributions come from one person.
- You need support for other model providers today. The README lists additional providers as planned, not as available features.
All health signals
| Last commit | 2024-07-03 (2.3 years ago) |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 90 days | 0 |
| Releases, last 12 months | 0 (latest v0.2.2, 2023-07-24) |
| Contributors | 11 (top contributor: 90% of commits) |
| Issues closed, last 90 days | 0 |
| Pull requests merged, last 90 days | 0 |
| Project age | 3 years |
Checked on 2026-10-20 with the GitHub API.
Overview
simpleaichat is a Python package for interfacing with OpenAI chat models, including ChatGPT and GPT-4. It aims to make chat-app workflows quick to build and easy to inspect, while reducing token use and avoiding the complexity of larger frameworks.
It suits developers who want a lightweight interface for interactive chats or for embedding model calls in their own applications. The package can manage chat sessions, stream responses, and handle structured inputs and outputs or calls to user-defined tools.
Key Features
- Create interactive chats from Python or the command line.
- Keep multiple independent chat sessions.
- Stream responses and use async calls, including async streaming and tools.
- Pass Pydantic models as schemas for structured inputs or outputs.
- Define Python functions as tools that the model can select and call.
- Save and reload chat sessions in CSV or JSON format.
- Adjust model parameters and prompts for individual generations or sessions.
Use Cases
- A Python developer can add a conversational interface to a small application without adopting a larger orchestration framework.
- A team can prototype an assistant that uses custom Python functions to retrieve information or perform tasks.
- A developer can run independent or asynchronous chats when building workflows that make multiple model requests.
- An application that needs predictable data can request structured output using a Pydantic schema.
- A user who prefers the terminal can start an interactive ChatGPT session from the command line.
What you need
Detected in the repository
- Python (from setup.py)
License in plain words
MITpermissive
- Commercial use: yes
- Modify and redistribute: yes
- You must keep: the copyright and license notice
- Share your changes: no
A summary, not legal advice: the LICENSE file is what applies.
Getting Started
Install from PyPI:
pip install simpleaichat
An OpenAI API key is required. See the README for setup options and usage details.
Considerations
The project is marked inactive, with no commits in over a year and no releases during that period. Its contribution history is concentrated in one person, and the supplied health data reports no recent issue closures or merged pull requests. Teams adopting it should assess whether the current code meets their needs and plan for maintaining or replacing it.
The package requires Python and an OpenAI API key. The README describes OpenAI chat models as its current focus; support for PaLM and Claude is listed as roadmap work. It also notes that the library does not solve prompt injection or other model-related safety concerns, so applications using tools or external input need their own safeguards.
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