Show HN: Smartly – Plain English to shell commands, with GNU/BSD awareness

what you mean.

You know what. smartly knows how.

smartly sends one plain English sentence to an LLM, validates the reply is a single shell command line, and runs it. For people who know what they want to do and would rather not remember the exact flags.

Install

brew install rizwanreza/tap/smartly`` go install github.com/rizwanreza/smartly-cli/cmd/smartly@latest Then run smartly onboard to pick a provider, a model and an execution mode.

The transform

Say the outcome. Get the command. #

What it does

Commands without the ceremony. #

• english → command

• One sentence in, one command outDescribe the result. smartly returns a single executable shell command — pipes, && and redirects allowed, multi-step scripts never.

• macos + linux

• Knows which userland it is onIt checks whether sed ,date ,stat and friends are GNU or BSD on your machine — a Mac with Homebrew coreutils has both — and writes flags that work with the ones you have:sed -i '' for BSD,date -d for GNU.

• dir + git

• Reads the roomBy default it sends a capped directory listing plus your git branch, status and worktrees, so “all worktrees except main” resolves against what is actually there.

• four providers

• Your model, your billingAnthropic and OpenAI by API key, or your own logged-in claude /codex CLI session if you already pay for a subscription.

• four ways to run

• Four ways to run itauto runs the command immediately and is the default.confirm asks[y/N] every time,confirm-destructive asks on anything it doesn’t recognise as safe, and--dry-run prints the command and runs nothing.

• learn mode

• Shows how the command works--learn prints the command, then breaks it down piece by piece: each flag, pipe and argument with what it does, colour-matched to the command above. Nothing runs.

Before you install it

Auto-run is the default. #

smartly generates a command and runs it immediately, with no confirmation prompt — including when that command is destructive. Under auto nothing inspects what the command does; the only check is that the model returned exactly one clean command line.

That is the product working as intended, and it is the setting most worth reconsidering on a machine where a wrong rm costs you something. Three ways to change it:

confirm Ask me every time

Prints the command and waits for [y/N]. Reads/dev/tty directly, and fails closed when there is no terminal.

execution:
  mode: confirm

confirm-destructive Ask me when it is not clearly safe

A local classifier reads the generated command and asks on anything it doesn’t recognise as safe — destructive or unrecognised alike. A best-effort seatbelt, not a sandbox: to see every command, useconfirm.

execution:
  mode: confirm-destructive

--dry-run Just show me

Prints the command and does nothing else. The right flag for a phrasing you are not sure about yet.

smartly --dry-run remove every merged branch

Providers

Four backends. Bring an API key or your existing CLI login. #

anthropic and openai call an API with your own key. claude-cli and codex-cli shell out to a CLI you are already logged into — slower, but no second bill. Andopenai speaks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including a local vLLM, Ollama or LM Studio.

Describe the result. #

Skip the flag archaeology.

brew install rizwanreza/tap/smartly`` go install github.com/rizwanreza/smartly-cli/cmd/smartly@latest