A Comma and a Question Mark, Redux: Quick Terminal Helpers Using Pi

A developer adapted Rémi Louf's terminal helper concept using the Pi CLI agent, creating two shell scripts that generate commands from plain English descriptions and answer questions directly in the terminal. The comma script copies suggested shell commands to the clipboard without executing them, while the question mark script provides concise AI answers using Pi's web search and file reading tools. The approach offers a lightweight alternative to running local AI models, relying instead on cloud-based models through OpenRouter.

A Comma and a Question Mark Redux 25 May 2026I 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 https://www.thetypicalset.com/blog/a-comma-and-a-question-mark 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 https://pi.dev , 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. The comma 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. bash $ 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: bash /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 "$command" Pi uses whichever model is currently selected. Typically for me this is on OpenRouterusing DeepSeek v4 Flash or Gemini 3.5 Flash. These have low or free API cost. I skipped the JSON Schema trick from the original. I don’t think pi exposes a structured output mode, so I just made the prompt tight and stripped backticks in post. The question mark Likewise, when I just have a short question, I now have the q script. Instead of launching a whole pi session, I can get a quick answer with minimal fuss: q what's the weather like today in Brutus, MI? The q command also invokes Pi, but now Pi can use a narrow toolset including from some extensions: pi --print -p \ --system-prompt "You are a helpful, concise assistant running in a macOS terminal. Answer clearly and accurately. You can read files from disk and search the web — use those when you need current or file-specific information." \ --tools "read,web search,url extract,web fetch,batch web fetch" \ "$question" You can find the script files in my dotfiles repo on GitHub https://github.com/z3ugma/.dotfiles/commit/a1453d02b3da53af4a442f45ddc3a938406cc5d2 .