ask

Hi everyone, as I spent a substantial amount of time in the console, even today, i sometimes need to think of some complex combination of git/find/ffmpeg/xargs and friends and so i've been using https://github.com/kagisearch/ask for some time. Since it appears to be unmaintained i started my own version (yes, thanks to some LLMs work) and i am quite happy with it. It appears to have gained a lot more features than i initially thought but there it is. My personal highlights are: - can install shortcuts for bash/fish/zsh for pressing CTRL-W and having the current prompt replaced with the "answer" $ find all images in this directory becomes $ find . -type f \( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.jpeg' -o -iname '*.png' -o -iname '*.gif' -o -iname '*.bmp' -o -iname '*.webp' -o -iname '*.svg' -o -iname '*.tiff' \) in 1-2 seconds. - there is also

When trying to figure out some complex shell command (What's the actual incantation of the git command, find or ffmpeg for my usecase?), i used to use https://github.com/kagisearch/ask for some time, which seems to be unmaintained. Also it tied to openrouter and some predefined model list. So i set out to build a better version. In the end, the new implementation added some new (maybe unique) features, like pressing CTRL-W in a shell prompt and having the text being replaced by some proper command to be executed with enter. Here is a quick glimpse of what it looks like the terminal: $ find the top 5 largest files ever committed in this git repository (-> hit CTRL-W <-) $ git rev-list --objects --all | git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectsize) %(rest)' | sed -n 's/^blob //p' | sort -rn | head -n 5 I'm curious to hear fee

ymmv, but I think all of this is too much and you generally don't need to think about how to use an AI properly since screaming at it usually works just as well as very fine tuned instructions. you don't need claude code, gemini-cli or codex I've been doing it raw as a (recent) lazyvim user with a proprietary agent with 3 tools: git, ask and ripgrep and currently gemini 3 is by far the best for me even without all these tricks. gemini 3 has a very high token density and a significantly larger context than any model that is actually usable, every 'agent' I start shoves 5 things into the context: - most basic instructions such as: generate git format diff only when editing files and use the git tool to merge it (simplified, it's more structured and deeper than this) - tree command that respects git ignore - $(ask "summarize $(git diff)") -

I'm using https://github.com/kagisearch/ask It's a simple shell script of 204 lines.