A Comma and a Question Mark

# A comma and a question mark Source: [https://www.thetypicalset.com/blog/a-comma-and-a-question-mark](https://www.thetypicalset.com/blog/a-comma-and-a-question-mark) I’ve been using a terminal for more than two decades now, building muscle memory for`find`flags and`git`commands\. I’m not sure how it happened, but reaching for`\-\-help`has become less and less natural\. Instead of typing the command I would start typing the*sentence*: “find the 5 largest files”, “show me the last 3 commits”\. `command not found` kept reminding me: computers can’t talk\. Or can’t they? In the glorious age of slop, any\(one\)\(thing\) can talk\. And sure it did; all it took was about a hundred lines of code to stitch together[zsh](https://www.zsh.org/),[llama\-server](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp),[Qwen3\.6](https://huggingface.co/Qwen),[Pi](https://pi.dev/)and three commands: - A comma for “give me a command” - A question mark for “answer my question” It was fun, easy, and only cost $7k for a M5 Max MBP with 128GB of unified memory\. ## The comma Now I can type a comma followed by plain English, a description of what I want to do\. A few seconds later I get a short list of commands, each with a one\-line explanation\. I pick one, it drops onto my prompt line\. I read it, maybe edit it, and press Enter myself\.  Of course, being the CEO of the[Structured Outputs Company™](https://dottxt.ai/), I had to use a few tricks:[JSON Schema](https://json-schema.org/)to get a list of`\{command, note\}`, and some grammar fun to force the command prefixes \(`ls`,`git`, etc\.\)\. The thing answering my commas is a 27B parameter model running locally through llama\.cpp\. It is not a frontier model and it doesn’t have to be\. I’m not asking it to be brilliant; I’m asking it to propose four ways to list large files\. Pinning the shape and a local model is more than enough, so is my laptop\. The question mark does a different job, so it gets a different tool\.  A question might be answered from what the model already knows, or it might need to read a file on my disk, or check something current on the web\. So the question mark hands the prompt to a small local agent instead \(the Amazing[Pi](https://pi.dev/)\)\. I’ve given it a deliberately narrow toolset: it can read files and it can search the web, and nothing else\. No writing, no editing, no running shell commands\. I want it to*look things up*, not erase my hard drive\. The answer comes back rendered as markdown, right there in the terminal\. ## It’s not about what it can do The comma never executes anything\. It proposes; I dispose\. The model is good enough to draft`git log \-\-oneline \-\-graph`and nowhere near trusted enough to run it unseen, so the command lands on my prompt line and waits for me to hit enter\. One keystroke between “here’s a candidate” and “yes, do that”, full safety\. The two exclamation marks that*act*on instructions instead of suggesting commands are still cooking\. Handing an agent permission to do things in my shell, rather than just look things up, is a different kind of evening, and I’m in no rush\. That’s a post for later\. ## An evening well spent I enjoyed implementing this a lot more than I’d like to admit\. The whole thing runs with the wifi off, does not ask for a credit card\. I still can’t type a sentence into a shell and have it happen*safely*, but I am real close\. Close enough\. Computer still can’t talk, but mine got a little better at helping me talk to it\.