A Comma and a Question Mark, Redux: Quick Terminal Helpers Using Pi

Summary

A Comma and a Question Mark Redux 25 May 2026 I am a decent user of the terminal, but I am not strong at remembering find flags - or rsync, or grep for that matter. I read Rémi Louf’s post about wiring a comma and a question mark into his shell and immediately wanted the same thing. The idea is simple: type , <description> and get a shell command that does what you described. Type ? <question> and get an AI answer right in your terminal. Rémi runs a local Qwen model through llama.cpp. I don’t have a local model, but I do have pi, a CLI chat agent, and I have my routing set through OpenRouter. Pi was already configured and working on my machine. So I took the idea and adapted it. The comma When I want nice shell commands, now all I have to do is type a comma followed by a plain English description of what I want to do. A few seconds later I get a suggested command copied to my clipboard. For example: , find the 5 largest files in the current directory A second later: is copied to my clipboard. I press Cmd+V, the command lands on my prompt line. I read it, maybe edit it, then press Enter myself. The comma is slightly safe because it won’t automatically execute. It copies to my clipboard and prints the command - so that I can judge and apply the keystroke between “here’s a suggestion” and “yes, do that”. Under the hood it’s a thin shell script in ~/.dotfiles/bin/, on my PATH: #!/usr/bin/env zsh local command command=$(pi --print -p --no-tools --thinking off \ --system-prompt "output exactly one shell command — the best one — with no numbering, no explanation, no markdown, no backticks. Just the raw command on a single line." "$desc" 2>/dev/null) echo -n "$command" | pbcopy echo "$command" Pi uses whichever model is currently selected. Typically for me this is on OpenRouterusing DeepSeek v4 Flash or Gemini 3.5 Flash. These have low or free API cost. I skipped the JSON Schema trick from the original. I don’t think pi exposes a structured output mode, so I just made the p...