Show HN: A tiny (480 LOC) AI coding assistant for your shell

#1

Post by n_kr » Thu, Jul 24, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

Hi HN. This is a script I have been using for some time for coding tasks, which I have polished a bit and published.

The motivation behind this script was to have an agent with persistent session which I can use from the shell like a regular command. It _can_ also be scripted, although I don't use it in such a way.

The script uses a minimal prompt, which just tells it to use standard unix tools to do everything. I was surprised at how well it worked, when using a good model. Qwen3-coder is on openrouter, and it works well with the minimal instructions. I also tested qwen2.5-coder with ollama and that works well too.

Show HN: A tiny (480 LOC) AI coding assistant for your shell
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Re: Show HN: A tiny (480 LOC) AI coding assistant for your shell

#2

Post by exographicskip » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 3:30 AM UTC

Cool concept! I'll give it a whirl over the weekend.

~~Have you thought about using uv's pep 723 implementation to simplify distribution?: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

EDIT:

Was gonna include the boilerplate example from the docs but jesus, hacker news' markdown implemenation is awful

EDIT 2:

Now that I'm looking at it, you already did hahaha. Ughhhh

Re: Show HN: A tiny (480 LOC) AI coding assistant for your shell

#3

Post by n_kr » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 5:49 AM UTC

exographicskip wrote: post #2

Cool concept! I'll give it a whirl over the weekend. ~~Have you thought about using uv's pep 723 implementation to simplify distribution?: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d... EDIT: Was gonna include the boilerplate example from the docs but jesus, hacker news' markdown implemenation is awful EDIT 2: Now that I'm looking at it, you already did hahaha. Ughhhh

Hey sorry for the late reply. Yes I use PEP 723 already, but there is also a requirements.txt so that vscode can be happy and do typechecks etc.

I really wish there was a way to tell vscode to understand inline metadata.