from Hacker News

Show HN: Forget bash, write your shell scripts in plain English

by statico on 3/26/25, 12:40 PM with 3 comments

  • by alyt on 3/26/25, 1:45 PM

    > Does this actually work? Yeah, somewhat! Could it create scripts that erase your drive? Maybe! Good luck!

    Love the transparency lol.

    Cool idea though! I imagine the "erase your hard drive" risk could be mitigated pretty well by adding an extra LLM step to double-check the generated script and explain each part of it (maybe add an `# explanatory comment` at the end of each line), and then an extra human step to confirm before executing the script.

  • by statico on 3/26/25, 12:45 PM

    Hey folks, a few days ago I wondered: Given all this LLM availability, why can’t I write shell scripts like this?

      #!/usr/bin/env llmscript
      
      Count all files in the current directory and its subdirectories
      Group them by file extension
      Print a summary showing the count for each extension
      Sort the results by count in descending order
    
    So I made it a reality in an evening an it kinda works: https://github.com/statico/llmscript

    It generates a script and a test suite, and then it attempts to fix the script until it passes the tests.

    It’s written in Go, but I hardly know Go, and used Cursor to generate most of it in a few hours. It works with Ollama and Claude, and I added support for OpenAI but haven’t tested it. You can also run it in Docker if you want to sandbox it.