Show HN: Magic-cli – A copilot for your command line

https://github.com/guywaldman/magic-cli

by guywald • 2 years ago

158 93 2 years ago

github.com

Blog post: https://guywaldman.com/posts/introducing-magic-cli

darby_nine• 2 years ago

How's the latency?

Carrok3• 2 years ago

That would depend on the LLM provider you select.

deckar01• 2 years ago

It isn’t streaming the ollama output so it feels slow (~3 words/second on a 3090 with the defaults). Using ollama directly streams within a second and you can kill it early. I don’t understand the UX of looping responses to the same question either. This does not feel like magic.

guywald8• 2 years ago

It's currently set not to stream (https://github.com/guywaldman/magic-cli/blob/4d4dca034063aa6...). The performance is something I plan to improve.

Carrok3• 2 years ago

Default mode should probably not be “unsafe-execution” but instead should be “clipboard”. Make people turn on the unsafe mode.

thelastparadise3• 2 years ago

I disagree.

It should be unsage execution but with an easy undo like git or zfs.

Carrok3• 2 years ago

I eagerly await your proposal on how to undo arbitrary cli commands.

callalex2• 2 years ago

How do you undo, for example, an HTTP request?

j16sdiz• 2 years ago

I disagree

It should be non recoverable. Everybody need to learn their lesson right.

hda111• 2 years ago

How to undo a zfs destroy?

usrbinbash2• 2 years ago

Alright, now I'm curious.

How do I "undo", say, `rm ./temp/*.txt`

h43z• 2 years ago

I've never seen this extra measure "curl --proto '=https' ..."

ape4• 2 years ago

Me neither - so I looked it up at https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html With the equals it means only allow the named protocols.

metadat2• 2 years ago

What would be allowed after SSL? By default, does curl allow redirects to http:// via -L?

If so.. that's kinda sketchy from a security perspective. Especially because the flag you've shown is very unwieldy.

guywald8• 2 years ago

Yep, this is auto-generated by cargo-dist (https://opensource.axo.dev/cargo-dist/book/)

xp84• 2 years ago

I'm not affiliated with it, but I've been using the Warp terminal program for a few months now and suspect that if you're interested in this kind of thing, you might like that too.

In short, besides the obvious AI stuff, which works well:

- You can edit the command line as though it's in a GUI program (including with mouse, etc) instead of it being inside the terminal where you need to use different keybindings and no mouse.

- When in a shell, instead of your window being one long stream of text, each command and each output is a discrete area, so it's easier to, say, select the whole output of a command.

dayjah2• 2 years ago

Warp also has a cool looking cataloging feature where commands can be bundled up and shared with your co-workers. Seems a good solution for sharing those dark arts folks tend to build up over time.

Edit: link to feature: https://docs.warp.dev/features/blocks

scubbo2• 2 years ago

Seems a good solution for sharing those dark arts folks tend to build up over time

This is one of the things I most _dislike_ about it. Don't incentivize hording those useful tools in yet-another-silo, get them out into a shared code package!

bongodongobob2• 2 years ago

Can I ask why it's so complicated? I made something similar about a year ago and it's less that 150 lines of Python. Gives you an explanation, option to run it with/without sudo, pretty colors, etc.

I guess I'm not very familiar with Rust but it just seems like a lot for what it does.

guywald8• 2 years ago

This is a great question. I added a "Why Rust?" section to the blog post to provide my rationale: https://guywaldman.com/posts/introducing-magic-cli#why-rust

Lienetic• 2 years ago

I assume you didn't mean to share a localhost link :)

thelastparadise3• 2 years ago

Uh buddy you linked to localhost:3000.

bongodongobob2• 2 years ago

Huh. Weird for such a simple "program" if you can even call it that, but I guess I get it. Thanks.

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

All of these solutions seemed very heavyweight in my usage. I wanted something that fit within my existing flow and using copilot.vim, EDITOR=nvim, C-x C-e was the solution for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40911564

It's very composable and I can do incremental work with it.

beacon2942• 2 years ago

You can also use esc-v to get to the editor if you switch your input to vim mode with "set -o vi" in your .bashrc file.

Or for extra points ^[v which will serve as a handier escape, as well.

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

Despite being vimian I've found set -o vi hard to work with. Do you like it? Neovim terminal seems better for me since output is selectable in the buffer.

rekttrader• 2 years ago

We as a computing populace are getting more and more comfortable with footguns.

Buttons8402• 2 years ago

You imply this is a footgun. How so?

How is this different than looking up a random webpage with the same information?

dijit2• 2 years ago

I mean...

This:

curl google.com/?search=remove+directory+linux&feeling_lucky=1 | html_strip | head -n 1 | bash

Is pretty dangerous, all things being equal, much more dangerous than copying and pasting and of course everything is more dangerous if you avoid engaging your brain entirely.

Closi• 2 years ago

Most people are pretty comfortable copying and pasting arbitrary commands they find on google and don't understand into the terminal, so I'm not convinced this is any worse.

nerdjon• 2 years ago

I have to agree, this to me seems like a great in theory but questionable in practice.

We know how much damage a cli can do, they often don't have the protections in place most other systems. I mean if I copy files with AWS s3 there is zero confirmation that I am not overriding files.

Personally I feel like if you really want to use an LLM to generate your commands, the extra step of copying it from a website is probably a good one. At least you will be forced to actually look at it instead of just assume it is right and hit enter.

The example given in the document is a simple one, but with more complex CLI calls I would be scared to use this for anything but the simplest of things.

That is ignoring the questionable decision to possibly send very sensitive information to ChatGPT to generate these commands.

tiberriver256• 2 years ago

I'll bet this was a lot of fun to make. Very cool project.

Was there any particular motive for building your own over using something that's been around a bit longer like aichat?

https://github.com/sigoden/aichat

guywald8• 2 years ago

Woah, the shell features are super similar. Honestly was not familiar with this project, looks great (and ambitious). I'll try it out. Thanks for the share.

jimmySixDOF• 2 years ago

Another approach converts into python:

An CLI assistant that responds by generating and auto-executing a Python script. https://github.com/AbanteAI/rawdog

Lord_Zero• 2 years ago

Aichat is super polished and I use it all the time. I don't see why I would use anything else at this time.

icholy• 2 years ago

I use https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd

guywald8• 2 years ago

Awesome share! Thank you. There are definitely similarities, and I love Simon's work. I guess the extra features are some sophisticated UX (requesting the user to fill out "placeholders" in the response, ability to revise the prompt), the "ask" command and the "search" command. Will definitely give this a spin.

fragmede• 2 years ago

https://github.com/KillianLucas/open-interpreter/ is my preferred implementation of approximately the same thing

notarealllama• 2 years ago

Huh, and I'm here running llama 3 locally (and claude.ai for less complex stuff), asking well formatted and specific questions and still adjusting the output before implementing it.

Besides I need .sh scripts not just cli completion.

But this reminds me of warp. Gonna have to give it a spin in the morning.

voodooEntity• 2 years ago

Funny, i recently build something really similar ^^

https://github.com/voodooEntity/go-clibuddy

pmarreck2• 2 years ago

I have a single Bash function called "please" that basically does the same thing

https://github.com/pmarreck/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/functio...

guywald8• 2 years ago

Nice! I like the `needs` utility :)

prmoustache• 2 years ago

But then you need to find another alias for sudo!

gkfasdfasdf• 2 years ago

What does this line do?

    [ -v EDIT ] && unset EDIT && edit_function "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "$BASH_SOURCE" && return

Very cool script overall, thanks for sharing

pmarreck2• 2 years ago

Ah, forgot to include that! That's a way to edit any of my functions via "edit <functionname>" and it drops you right on the correct line in your $EDITOR of choice. Otherwise it defaults to passing it into your editor (ostensibly a path).

    needs() {
      [ -v EDIT ] && unset EDIT && edit_function "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "$BASH_SOURCE" && return;
      local bin="$1";
      shift;
      command -v "$bin" > /dev/null 2>&1 || {
        printf "%s is required but it's not installed or in PATH; %s\n" "$bin" "$*" 1>&2;
        return 1
      }
    }

    contains() {
      [ -v EDIT ] && unset EDIT && edit_function "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "$BASH_SOURCE" && return;
      local word;
      for word in $1;
      do
        if [[ "$word" == "$2" ]]; then
          return 0;
        fi;
      done;
      return 1
    }

    edit_function() {
      [ -v EDIT ] && unset EDIT && edit_function "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "$BASH_SOURCE" && return;
      needs rg "please install ripgrep!";
      local function_name="$1";
      local function_name="${function_name//\?/\\?}";
      local file="$2";
      local fl=$(rg -n -e "${function_name} *\(\) *\{" -e "function +${function_name}(?: *\(\))? *\{" "$file" | tail -n1 | cut -d: -f1);
      $EDITOR "$file":$fl
    }

    edit() {
      [ -v EDIT ] && unset EDIT && edit_function "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "$BASH_SOURCE" && return;
      if contains "$(functions)" $1; then
        EDIT=1 $1;
      else
        $EDITOR "$@";
      fi
    }

Once you have those set in your environment, and EDITOR points to whatever editor you prefer, you can simply add the following line to the top of any bash function you define and make it editable-in-place basically:

    [ -v EDIT ] && unset EDIT && edit_function "${FUNCNAME[0]}" "$BASH_SOURCE" && return;

I use the [ -v variablename ] pattern to detect whether it's set or not so that things like EDIT=1 and EDIT=true will work the same way, but I've also seen ((EDIT)) used, which for values of 1 gives a return code of 0 (making that expression true) otherwise returns a fail, but that only works if you use 1 or 0 to designate "true" and "false" for switches... and it's of course confusing that you need to reverse those in Bash logic which works off return codes and not actual values

computatrum• 2 years ago

There is also https://github.com/TNG/please-cli

teddyh• 2 years ago

Beware the pitfalls of yesteryear: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html>

compressedgas• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Teitelman

_def• 2 years ago

Funny to see this, I first came across it with https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

boomskats• 2 years ago

This is nice. I've been taking Termium[0] for a spin and it's been pretty great for the most part, but the Rumsfeld-complete always-on autosuggest/copilot UX they're aiming for does feel like a bit of a compromise.

On occasions when I do know what I don't know, and want to specifically opt in, this looks perfect.

[0] https://codeium.com/blog/termium-codeium-in-terminal-launch

Xen9• 2 years ago

The general concept is limited "command line" as means of giving a single agent agency without the need to program every integration separatively.

The AGI version is "command line" also enabling the agents to communicate, modify, make each other.

pcwelder• 2 years ago

I've been using https://github.com/tom-doerr/zsh_codex with gpt4-o and it saves a lot of strokes as compared to github copilot cli to query, since I just have to press ctrl-x in addition to the prompt.

Magic-cli also seems to be using same workflow as github copilot, so I'm not rushing to use it.

ano-ther• 2 years ago

Neat. How does it compare to https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/ ?

swyx• 2 years ago

it's built in RUST!

satvikpendem• 2 years ago

Then that's good enough for me to use it :)

kordlessagain• 2 years ago

I got stuck on setting the ollama.embedding_model. No clue what to do.

sathishvj• 2 years ago

My version called "gencmd" also has a web page, supports multiple models, and also has org+groups support. Please try it out - would love your feedback. https://gencmd.com/

Show HN: Magic-cli – A copilot for your command line

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