Tools: What If Vector Search With Voyage AI And Mongodb Was Just... Simple?
I did not set out to build a CLI for Voyage AI... I was trying to answer a question I kept hearing from smart, capable developers who already understood databases and already understood AI. They were not confused. They were exhausted... in the same way I was exhausted when I first started building solutions for and with AI.
The question always showed up at the same moment. Right after embeddings made sense on paper. Right after Atlas Vector Search started to look promising. Right about this moment, 9 out of 10 times, one of the bright developers would as the same question.
I vividly remember hitting this same wall. I had the models. I had the cluster. I had a terminal open and a notebook full of code that, frankly I did not want to maintain. Every step felt reasonable on its own. Together, they felt heavy. So we've got to 1. Embed text. 2. Store vectors. 3. Create an index. 4. Query. 5. Optionally Rerank. Then debug everything and rerun the whole flow.
What bothered me was not the complexity. Each of the steps were simple in and of themselves... It was the friction. This was work I needed to do over and over, and every time it pulled me out of the problem I actually wanted to solve.
At some point I stopped asking how to explain the process better and started asking a different question.
vai came out of that moment. Not as a product idea, but as a convenience I wanted for myself. A way to stay in the terminal, move fast, and get from raw text to a meaningful search result without building a small app every time.
This post covers every feature. It's long on purpose — consider it the reference guide I wish existed when I started building with vector search.
Disclaimer: vai (voyageai-cli) is an independent community tool. It is not an official product of MongoDB, Inc. or Voyage AI. For official docs, visit mongodb.com/docs/voyageai.
Ok, if you're like me... you're chomping at the bit - let's see some software. We'll start with installation and then I'll walk you through use cases.
That gives you the vai binary. Node.js 18+ required. No Python, no native modules, no build step.
Source: Dev.to
