I am a decent user of the terminal, but I am not strong at remembering find
flags - or rsync
, or grep
for that matter.
I read Rémi Louf’s post about wiring a comma and a question mark into his shell and immediately wanted the same thing. The idea is simple: type , <description>
and get a shell command that does what you described. Type ? <question>
and get an AI answer right in your terminal.
Rémi runs a local Qwen model through llama.cpp. I don’t have a local model, but I do have pi, a CLI chat agent, and I have my routing set through OpenRouter. Pi was already configured and working on my machine. So I took the idea and adapted it.
When I want nice shell commands, now all I have to do is type a comma followed by a plain English description of what I want to do. A few seconds later I get a suggested command copied to my clipboard. For example:
, find the 5 largest files in the current directory
A second later:
ls -lS
is copied to my clipboard. I press Cmd+V, the command lands on my prompt line. I read it, maybe edit it, then press Enter myself.
$ ls -lS
The comma is slightly safe because it won’t automatically execute. It copies to my clipboard and prints the command - so that I can judge and apply the keystroke between “here’s a suggestion” and “yes, do that”.
Under the hood it’s a thin shell script in ~/.dotfiles/bin/,
on my PATH:
#!/usr/bin/env zsh
local command
command=$(pi --print -p --no-tools --thinking off \
--system-prompt "output exactly one shell command —
the best one — with no numbering, no explanation,
no markdown, no backticks. Just the raw command
on a single line." "$desc" 2>/dev/null)
echo -n "$command" | pbcopy
echo "$command"
Pi uses whichever model is currently selected. Typically for me this is on OpenRouterusing DeepSeek v4 Flash or Gemini 3.5 Flash. These have low or free API cost.
I skipped the JSON Schema trick from the original. I don’t think pi exposes a structured output mode, so I just made the prompt tight and stripped backticks in post.
Likewise, when I just have a short question, I now have the q
script. Instead of launching a whole pi
session, I can get a quick answer with minimal fuss:
q what's the weather like today in Brutus, MI?
The q
command also invokes Pi, but now Pi can use a narrow toolset including from some extensions:
pi --print -p \
--system-prompt "You are a helpful, concise assistant
running in a macOS terminal. Answer clearly and accurately.
You can read files from disk and search the web — use those
when you need current or file-specific information." \
--tools "read,web_search,url_extract,web_fetch,batch_web_fetch" \
"$question"
You can find the script files in my dotfiles repo on GitHub.