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Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

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Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#71

Post by fallingfrog »

I love how a few years ago everyone was fretting over how to keep an AGI in a leakproof box, http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/LeakproofingtheSingularity.pdf

And now, a few years later we just give it a bash shell and full access to the internet. So much for the box! I can’t believe how naive we were to think that the people who developed an ai would prioritize anything over profit and how fast the genie would escape- it’s not even AGI yet but at the point where it becomes AGI, with this kind of precedent set it’s laughable to think that we will put any sort of guardrails on it.

All this time we thought it was a technical or philosophical problem but the real problem was capitalism and the glacial pace that the general public picks up on what is going on. It would take decades to get the people at large to agree that the threat is even real and decades more to get to the point where public opinion was decisive enough to counteract all that money, and only then do you get to even try to keep it contained.

The project itself is very well executed though

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#72

Post by simonmysun »

threecheese wrote: post #53
simonmysun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Plandex is also nice! I never thought of such workflow. Unfortunately, I did not know Simon Willinson’s `llm` tool. I would imagine he must have written such softwares. It has support for more in-depth manipulating of LLMs. ell lacks these functionalities and only make use of the most commonly-used and also most basic interfaces but has more user experience improvements like pagination or syntax highlighting…

That’s quite an honest and emotionally mature response, and I am always glad to find Real People(tm) around the internet. Rare these days. Your product looks great btw! Consider me another Stargazer, and keep building it.

Thank you!

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#73

Post by simonmysun »

e12e wrote: post #57
simonmysun wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestions! I read your code and the support of images is awesome. I would not assume everyone has sqlite but this can be done optionally with a plugin. Will consider writing a demo for this. Using XDG directories and system secrets sounds a lot better than what I did. I will learn how to use them and try to integrate them with my code!

> I would not assume everyone has sqlite but this can be done optionally with a plugin. Will consider writing a demo for this. Used to be everyone used BerkleyDB or some similar key-value store - for a great many usecases SQLite is just pragmatically better. And it's arguably less exotic than perl. You should of course do what want - but "just use SQLite" is pretty solid advice when dealing with structured data - and…

I can't deny the benefits. But in my mind, this is not what ell should take care of. It doesn't intend to store anything whether in a text file or any other format. It should however provide the posibilities for users to store them in any way they like.

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#74

Post by simonmysun »

callamdelaney wrote: post #58
llimllib wrote: post #11

I wrote a similar tool I'm no longer maintaining: https://github.com/llimllib/gpt-bash-cli/ . Here are my suggestions: - save the conversations in a sqlite db. ~everyone has sqlite available and it allows the user to do things with the data more easily than a text file - use XDG directories instead of suggesting ~/.ellrcd ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Base_Directory ) - I prefer using system secret stores to…

On the contrary please don't use the keyring, its annoying and some systems don't have it. Your llm key is not that critical, and you should trust what runs on your system. Poetry demands access to my keyring and I don't use poetry (open bug for years, it doesnt even need access).

I know that it's contraversial. It would be an option or even a customized way of using ell mentioned in document. I wouldn't force users to adopt any unmatured or uncommon standard.

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#75

Post by simonmysun »

behnamoh wrote: post #62
simonmysun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely! For example, cat somecode.py | ell -f - If you prefer adding another piece of prompt instantly instead of adding it in the template: (cat somecode.py; echo "Explain this code") | ell -f - I should've added this into README. I really love your "llm" and the blog posts but somehow I missed them before. I believe I would be a lot less motivated to write ell if I had read your post first.

> I really love your "llm" and the blog posts but somehow I missed them before. I believe I would be a lot less motivated to write ell if I had read your post first. I mean, doing a simple search like "CLI interface for LLMs" shows multiple tools made by people over the years. Not to bash your work (pun intended), but I don't see the point of creating yet another CLI interface for LLMs at this point.

Well, either I'm not good at googling or google is not good at searching. I did searched similar products and I have listed them in the README. Perhaps I just didn't pick the correct keyword. I'm sorry that many wonderful similar products are not listed, but I currently don't find any of them completely cover the features of ell.

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#76

Post by simonmysun »

koinedad wrote: post #64

I love the idea of piping my error messages into an LLM to help me debug. Would also love a solid local only LLM and have this basically in offline mode as well

Please stay tuned. Support for more providers are on the way!

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#77

Post by simonmysun »

woolion wrote: post #67

So, last weekend I wanted to use an LLM to review some documents, and the problem I had was not so much the interface but that it's necessary to have some workflow management to re-run failed jobs and run the aggregate job once its dependencies are done. I ended up writing my own to do it, but I wondered if there are off-the-shelf solutions that already provide these kinds of work.

I don't have a solution yet but it's also a problem I am trying to address. The output of LLM is not stable and robust and currently we can only adjust the prompt to improve it. Fundamental tools like piping in the shells cannot easily handle this. You must either rerun the whole pipeline or start to write more complex script which includes validating and parsing the output.

I checked your solution and it looks promising. Will you make it a general purpose LLM workflow scheduler?

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#78

Post by simonmysun »

e12e wrote: post #68

Interesting - unfortunately displays typical llm issues in the demo video: > It's important to note that using `1 ` can lead to unexpected behavior if the file already exists, as it will be overwritten. > To avoid this, you can use the `-a` option to append to the file instead of overwriting it. For example: > `bash ls 1 output.txt > This will append the output of the `ls command the file `output.txt` if it already e…

You are right. I will replace the video. Actually the last time I record it wasn't this bad. And the script was kept and I didn't make much change when recording it again.

Here's the first video I recorded for an earlier version: https://github.com/simonmysun/ell/blob/d4fc5468157fa6adc8f9f...

Unfortunately, LLMs are not stable.

For reference, here's the link to the video with mistake:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/1355ad08-6fbf-4c0... https://github.com/simonmysun/ell/blob/553d38f60ad104893b2a3...

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#79

Post by simonmysun »

fallingfrog wrote: post #71

I love how a few years ago everyone was fretting over how to keep an AGI in a leakproof box, http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/LeakproofingtheSingularity.pdf And now, a few years later we just give it a bash shell and full access to the internet. So much for the box! I can’t believe how naive we were to think that the people who developed an ai would prioritize anything over profit and how fast the genie would escape- it…

That truly is a visionary article; thank you for sharing it. We still cannot afford to be complacent, but I believe it is the responsibility of the users to ensure safe and ethical usage.

Re: Show HN: Ell – A command-line interface for LLMs written in Bash

#80

Post by kqr »

simonw wrote: post #70
kqr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been an LLM skeptic for a long time, but the llm CLI and your review of Claude 3 Opus (and subsequently discovering how comparatively cheap 3.5 Sonnet is) has started to turn LLMs into something I use daily. Exactly that piping comes into handy all the time. I use it to estimate reading time of things on the web, through curl | llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet -s 'How long does the main content of this article take to…

I love that ‘q’ script, definitely going to try that myself.

I did turn it into an article with some more examples, if you're curious: https://two-wrongs.com/q.html
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