overthink — The CLI That Panics For You

Breaking

Local Developer Asks Simple Question; Receives Peer-Reviewed Academic Analysis Instead

By overthink v0.1.0 · Read time: longer than you'd like

You have a simple question. Maybe it's "Should I quit my job?" Maybe it's "Is pineapple on pizza a moral issue?" In either case, what you need is not a simple answer. What you need is a peer-reviewed academic analysis complete with fabricated statistics, fictional citations, and a philosophical conclusion that validates whatever you were already planning to do anyway.

overthink is that tool.

overthink

$ overthink "Should I quit my job?"

═══════════════════════════════════════════════
  THE GREAT RESIGNATION PARADOX: A TREATISE
═══════════════════════════════════════════════

Executive Summary:
Your question has been analyzed with the rigor
of a doctoral committee that bills by the hour.

Probability Breakdown:
  Success if you quit .... ██████████████ 71.2%
  Regret by Thursday .... ████████████   63.4%
  Existential crisis .... ████████████████ 89.1%

Emotional Risk Index: ████████████████████░░ 87/100

Citation:
  [1] Henderson et al., "Premature Career Exits
      and Their Correlation with 2AM Decision-Making"
      Proceedings on Human Indecision (Special Issue)

Grand Conclusion:
You should absolutely do it. Or not. The data
is both definitive and utterly non-committal.

* Output is randomized. Same question, infinite drama. Nothing above is real, including your confidence.

Key Findings

Every invocation produces the following deliverables^†

Dramatic Titles

ALL-CAPS recontextualizations of your question as if it were the plot of an existential thriller.

Executive Summary

Delivered with the confidence of a consultant who bills $400/hour and has never been wrong (allegedly).

Probability Breakdown

Suspiciously precise percentages that somehow always feel disturbingly accurate.

Risk Visualization

Colored ASCII bars that shift from calm green → concerning yellow → alarming red.

Academic Citations

From peer-reviewed publications that absolutely do not exist, such as "Journal of Speculative Self-Sabotage."

Grand Conclusion

A final verdict that is simultaneously definitive and utterly non-committal. You're welcome.

^† Deliverables are non-binding, non-refundable, and not admissible in court.

Mechanism of Action

Local Mode default

Runs entirely offline. Uses a time-seeded random number generator, so every invocation produces fresh, unique drama. No two analyses of the same question will ever be identical — unless you're running them so fast the clock hasn't changed, which says something about your anxiety levels.

LLM Mode --thinker

Pipe your question through a local Ollama model and let an AI add its own neuroses. If anything fails — Ollama not installed, model missing, timeout — the tool gracefully falls back to the local engine. The drama never stops.

Acquire the Tool

Choose your vector of self-sabotage

Homebrew

macOS & Linux

brew install rishichawda/tap/overthink

Chocolatey

Windows

choco install overthink

Bash Script

macOS & Linux

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rishichawda/overthinker/main/install.sh | bash

APT

Ubuntu / Debian

curl -1sLf 'https://rishichawda.github.io/overthinker/overthink-archive-keyring.gpg' \
  | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/rishichawda-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/rishichawda-archive-keyring.gpg] \
  https://rishichawda.github.io/overthinker stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rishichawda.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install overthink

DNF / Copr

Fedora / RHEL

sudo dnf copr enable rishichawda/overthink
sudo dnf install overthink

Go Install

Any platform with Go

go install github.com/rishichawda/overthinker/cmd/overthink@latest

Or just download the binary like a person who has already made up their mind.

Field Application

# The basics
overthink "Should I quit my job?"

# Let a local LLM add its own neuroses
overthink --thinker llama3 "What does my life mean?"

# The truly important questions
overthink "Should I adopt a third cat?"
overthink "Is pineapple on pizza a moral issue?"
overthink "Why did I message them at 2am?"

You're reading this because you have a question you're overthinking.
You've already decided what you want to do.
This tool will make it feel peer-reviewed and scientifically justified.

Now stop reading and run:

overthink "something that matters"