talk

Mods!

AI for the command line, built for pipelines.

LLM based AI is really good at interpreting the output of commands and returning the results in CLI friendly text formats like Markdown. Mods is a simple tool that makes it super easy to use AI on the command line and in your pipelines. Mods works with OpenAI and LocalAI

To get started, install Mods and check out some of the examples below. Since Mods has built-in Markdown formatting, you may also want to grab Glow to give the output some pizzazz.

What Can It Do?

Mods works by reading standard in and prefacing it with a prompt supplied in the mods arguments. It sends the input text to an LLM and prints out the result, optionally asking the LLM to format the response as Markdown. This gives you a way to "question" the output of a command. Mods will also work on standard in or an argument supplied prompt individually.

For example you can:

Improve Your Code

Piping source code to Mods and giving it an instruction on what to do with it gives you a lot of options for refactoring, enhancing or debugging code.

mods -f "what are your thoughts on improving this code?" < main.go | glow

Come Up With Product Features

Mods can also come up with entirely new features based on source code (or a README file).

mods -f "come up with 10 new features for this tool." < main.go | glow

Help Write Docs

Mods can quickly give you a first draft for new documentation.

mods "write a new section to this readme for a feature that sends you a free rabbit if you hit r" | glow

Organize Your Videos

The file system can be an amazing source of input for Mods. If you have music or video files, Mods can parse the output of ls and offer really good editorialization of your content.

ls ~/vids | mods -f "organize these by decade and summarize each" | glow

Make Recommendations

Mods is really good at generating recommendations based on what you have as well, both for similar content but also content in an entirely different media (like getting music recommendations based on movies you have).

ls ~/vids | mods -f "recommend me 10 shows based on these, make them obscure" | glow

ls ~/vids | mods -f "recommend me 10 albums based on these shows, do not include any soundtrack music or music from the show" | glow

Read Your Fortune

It's easy to let your downloads folder grow into a chaotic never-ending pit of files, but with Mods you can use that to your advantage!

ls ~/Downloads | mods -f "tell my fortune based on these files" | glow

Understand APIs

Mods can parse and understand the output of an API call with curl and convert it to something human readable.

curl "https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=29.00&longitude=-90.00&current_weather=true&hourly=temperature_2m,relativehumidity_2m,windspeed_10m" 2>/dev/null | mods -f "summarize this weather data for a human." | glow

Read The Comments (so you don't have to)

Just like with APIs, Mods can read through raw HTML and summarize the contents.

curl "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048332" 2>/dev/null | mods -f "what are the authors of these comments saying?" | glow

Installation

Mods works with OpenAI compatible endpoints. By default, Mods is configured to support OpenAI's official API and a LocalAI installation running on port 8080. You can configure additional endpoints in your settings file by running mods -s.

OpenAI

Mods uses GPT-4 by default and will fallback to GPT-3.5 Turbo if it's not available. Set the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable to a valid OpenAI key, which you can get from here.

LocalAI

LocalAI allows you to run a multitude of models locally. Mods works with the GPT4ALL-J model as setup in this tutorial. You can define more LocalAI models and endpoints with mods -s.

Install Mods

# macOS or Linux
brew install charmbracelet/tap/mods

# Arch Linux (btw)
yay -S mods

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://repo.charm.sh/apt/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/charm.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/charm.gpg] https://repo.charm.sh/apt/ * *" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/charm.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install mods

# Fedora/RHEL
echo '[charm]
name=Charm
baseurl=https://repo.charm.sh/yum/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://repo.charm.sh/yum/gpg.key' | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/charm.repo
sudo yum install mods

Or, download it:

• Packages are available in Debian and RPM formats
• Binaries are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows

Or, just install it with go:

go install github.com/tartavull/alfredo/talk@latest

Settings

Mods lets you tune your query with a variety of settings. You can configure Mods with mods -s or pass the settings as environment variables and flags.

Model

-m, --model, MODS_MODEL

Mods uses gpt-4 with OpenAI by default but you can specify any model as long as your account has access to it or you have installed locally with LocalAI.

You can add new models to the settings with mods -s. You can also specify a model and an API endpoint with -m and -a to use models not in the settings file.

Format As Markdown

-f, --format, MODS_FORMAT

LLMs are very good at generating their response in Markdown format. They can even organize their content naturally with headers, bullet lists... Use this option to append the phrase "Format the response as Markdown." to the prompt.

Max Tokens

--max-tokens, MODS_MAX_TOKENS

Max tokens tells the LLM to respond in less than this number of tokens. LLMs are better at longer responses so values larger than 256 tend to work best.

Temperature

--temp, MODS_TEMP

Sampling temperature is a number between 0.0 and 2.0 and determines how confident the model is in its choices. Higher values make the output more random and lower values make it more deterministic.

TopP

--topp, MODS_TOPP

Top P is an alternative to sampling temperature. It's a number between 0.0 and 2.0 with smaller numbers narrowing the domain from which the model will create its response.

No Limit

--no-limit, MODS_NO_LIMIT

By default Mods attempts to size the input to the maximum size the allowed by the model. You can potentially squeeze a few more tokens into the input by setting this but also risk getting a max token exceeded error from the OpenAI API.

Include Prompt

-P, --prompt, MODS_INCLUDE_PROMPT

Include prompt will preface the response with the entire prompt, both standard in and the prompt supplied by the arguments.

Include Prompt Args

-p, --prompt-args, MODS_INCLUDE_PROMPT_ARGS

Include prompt args will include only the prompt supplied by the arguments. This can be useful if your standard in content is long and you just a want a summary before the response.

Max Retries

--max-retries, MODS_MAX_RETRIES

The maximum number of retries to failed API calls. The retries happen with an exponential backoff.

Fanciness

--fanciness, MODS_FANCINESS

Your desired level of fanciness.

Quiet

-q, --quiet, MODS_QUIET

Output nothing to standard err.

Whatcha Think?

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this project. Feel free to drop us a note.

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• The Fediverse
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License

MIT

Part of Charm.

Charm 热爱开源 • Charm loves open source