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2 hours ago
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Shellai (pronounced shellay) is a command-line interface for getting AI assistance without network calls or a separate interface. It's built around the idea that I should be able to, in my terminal, simply type ai, do this thing and have it generate the command for me.
Shellai uses local small-language models (SLMs) to fulfill user requests. Your data stays on your machine. Unlike other tools like shellgpt, the local inference is built into this tool - no need to turn up an ollama server seperatly.
- git clone https://github.com/micrictor/shellai.git && cd shellai && pip install -e .
- ptrace must be allowed for all processes owned by the same user. This can be set temporarily (until next reboot) using echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope.
- Setting this can be bad, since it allows any process running as a user to access memory/internal state of all other processes for that user.
- hf login to set up your HuggingFace credentials for use to download the model.
- In HuggingFace, accept the Gemma license and request access to my finetuned model, which is the default for the tool. This is optional if you want to use other models - sorry for the added friction, but the Gemma3 license/TOS is hard to understand so I don't know if I can have it "public".
- Run your first prompt, like ai, show me the last 10 lines of the readme
Looking for some variant on "grep all the files for 'root'"
(.venv) [mtu@archlap shellai]$ time ai, --model google/gemma-3-270m-it list every file in /etc that contains the string "root"
Using model google/gemma-3-270m-it
🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢
real 0m11.176s
user 0m12.742s
sys 0m1.086s
(.venv) [mtu@archlap shellai]$ ls -l /etc^C
(.venv) [mtu@archlap shellai]$ time ai, --model google/gemma-3-270m-it list every file in /etc that contains the string "root"
Using model google/gemma-3-270m-it
🐢🐢🐢
real 0m5.206s
user 0m12.841s
sys 0m1.010s
(.venv) [mtu@archlap shellai]$ ls /etc/passwd
(.venv) [mtu@archlap shellai]$ time ai, list every file in /etc that contains the string "root"
Using model micrictor/gemma-3-270m-it-ft-bash
🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢
real 0m10.549s
user 0m19.052s
sys 0m1.059s
(.venv) [mtu@archlap shellai]$ find /etc -type f -exec grep -l root '{}' \;
