Kilobat CLI

Kilobat CLI turns everyday network questions into commands. It can tell you which app is using bandwidth, how strong the Wi-Fi signal is and which channel it's on, whether there's packet loss, why one API won't connect from your Mac, and whether traffic is going out through a VPN. It also tracks data on metered hotspots and can keep the Mac awake until a long job finishes. Every command returns JSON, which makes the output easy to script.

The more distinctive part is kilobat mcp, a local stdio MCP server with 43 tools. Add it to Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Zed or another agent and you can ask "is this a hotspot before I download 5 GB?" or "keep the Mac awake until this build finishes" in plain language. Read-only tools run without confirmation, while anything that changes a setting tells the agent to ask you first. Some actions also need administrator authorization from macOS.

The quickest install is brew install seifip/kilobat/kilobat, which builds from source and needs Xcode 16 or newer. You can also build it yourself with Swift 6 on macOS 14 or later. A Claude Desktop extension package is available from the GitHub releases, and setup guides for each agent are on the Kilobat site.

The CLI and its source are licensed GPL-3.0 only. One limitation comes from macOS itself. The system shows Wi-Fi network names only to apps with Location permission, so the CLI reads names, filter status and per-network data budgets from the separate Kilobat menu-bar app when it's running. That app is proprietary and distributed under its own terms. Without it, signal, channels and the other checks still work, but network names show as hidden.