A Comma and a Question Mark Redux

A developer adapted Rémi Louf's shell-based AI assistant concept to work with the CLI agent Pi and OpenRouter, creating two custom commands that generate shell commands from plain English descriptions and answer terminal questions. The comma command copies suggested commands to the clipboard without automatic execution, while the question mark command provides concise AI answers using web search and file-reading tools.

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