I am using ionic 1.0.0-beta.14 on Mac OS X 10.9.5. This is all that happens:
$ ionic serve
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Usage: ionic task args
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Available tasks:
start - Start a new Ionic project with the given name.
emulate - Emulate an ionic project on a simulator or emulator.
run - Run an ionic project on a connected device.
build - Locally build an ionic project for a given platform
platform - Configure platform targets for building an Ionic app