Generating Shell Command from Plain English with LLM
LLM are really good at generating shell commands. We can leverage it to quickly convert our intent to shell command.
In this example, I’ll be using llama-3.1-8b-instant model powered by Groq for quick response almost instantly.
The converted command will be auto entered in the shell (it’ll not execute, obsviously for safety concerns)
Here is the bash/zsh function. We’ll be using jq for interacting with JSON and curl for making API request. Apart from those two packages there are no other depedencies.
Make sure that you’ve set GROQ_API_KEY env variable set in your shell.
# ai: Generate exact shell command from natural language using Groq API; no execution; globbing disabled
ai() {
emulate -L zsh
setopt NO_GLOB
local query="$*"
local system_msg="You are a command line expert. The user wants to run a command but they don't know how. Return ONLY the exact shell command needed. Do not prepend with an explanation, no markdown, no code blocks - just return the raw command you think will solve their query."
local payload
payload=$(jq -n --arg sys "$system_msg" --arg usr "$query" '{
model: "llama-3.1-8b-instant",
temperature: 0,
max_completion_tokens: 256,
messages: [
{ role: "system", content: $sys },
{ role: "user", content: $usr }
]
}')
local cmd
cmd=$(curl -s "https://api.groq.com/openai/v1/chat/completions" \
-X POST \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ${GROQ_API_KEY}" \
-d "$payload" \
| jq -r '.choices[0].message.content' \
| tr -d '\000-\037' \
| sed 's/^[[:space:]]*//;s/[[:space:]]*$//')
print -z -- "$cmd"
}
# Ensure globbing is disabled when invoking `ai`
alias ai='noglob ai'
Credits
This snippet is based on https://x.com/iannuttall/status/1975615590267298006/photo/1
Happy AI-assisted workflows!
