I have been working on something like this that fits better into my existing bash/zsh workflow. So I landed on using ollama and a small widget that tries to mirror the same behavior of ctrl+r aka reverse-i-search. Barely functional, but I have found value from it.
I think saying there’s “no confidence in the answer provided by an AI” is an overstatement and underestimates the value AI can have for the majority of users because that statement overestimates the value of “a reputable source that provides not only the command I’m looking for, but an explanation of the syntax” for the majority of users. Reputable sources and thorough explanations are great in theory, but very few have the patience to go through all that for a single CLI command when they want to make visible progress on the bigger picture project they actually care about.
> I think saying there’s “no confidence in the answer provided by an AI” is an overstatement and underestimates the value AI can have for the majority of users because that statement overestimates the value of “a reputable source that provides not only the command I’m looking for, but an explanation of the syntax” for the majority of users. Reputable sources and thorough explanations are great in theory, but very few have the patience to go through all that for a single CLI command when they want to make visible progress on the bigger picture project they actually care about.
These are exactly the people who shouldn't be running code written by a random number generator.
The beauty of technology and the internet is that there's near-zero gatekeeping. Anyone with enough interest and time can learn to build anything without seriously harming anyone. Dismissing LLMs as a random number generator is very clearly an overstatement for the value they're already able to provide. Ideally, how would you suggest a new developer learn to build something such as a REST API in Python?
You don’t need to have confidence, these are shell one liners, you can generate it, run it, and verify the results in the time it would take you to open a browser window or scroll halfway down a man page.
And if it doesn’t work, then you can still fallback on those.
I don’t mean to be dismissive or reductive. If I need to do something more complex then I’m probably not trying to do it in a shell one-liner.
I used this feature earlier today and prompted it with something like “given piped input, use awk to filter just the 2nd and 5th columns, and truncate the 5th column to 25 chars”. I don’t use awk often but I know that it exists, and I could have figured out how to do this in about 20-40 seconds with a google search or man page, but this was 10x faster.
It sounds like you're recommending people to not understand the shell one-liners they're pasting into their CLI and instead just verify that the outcome was observed after the fact?
That's pretty much the opposite of what I've understood to be "good terminal practice" for my entire life, which can be summed up as "don't execute anything in the terminal that you don't understand".
Is "just paste it and hope you don't lost data/just installed a virus" the new modus-oprandi?
Yes
> Is "just paste it and hope you don't lost data/just installed a virus" the new modus-oprandi?
No
Somewhere in between those two extremes is knowing enough to know that the command you’re pasting in isn’t going to install a virus, even though you don’t fully understand what the -g flag is doing
I fail to see any middle ground between those two "extremes", it's pretty black and white.
You find something and discover after trying it out that you have the gnu version or Mac version or a outdated or much newer version of the tool.
Than I give up, scroll through some shitty man page to slowly pull out one option after the other.