Show HN: qqqa – a fast, stateless LLM-powered assistant for your shell

42•iagooar•1h ago

I built qqqa as an open-source project, because I was tired of bouncing between shell, ChatGPT / the browser for rather simple commands. It comes with two binaries: qq and qa.

qq means "quick question" - it is read-only, perfect for the commands I always forget.

qa means "quick agent" - it is qq's sibling that can run things, but only after showing its plan and getting an approval by the user.

It is built entirely around the Unix philosophy of focused tools, stateless by default - pretty much the opposite of what most coding agent are focusing on.

Personally I've had the best experience using Groq + gpt-oss-20b, as it feels almost instant (up to 1k tokens/s according to Groq) - but any OpenAI-compatible API will do.

Curious if the HN crowd finds it useful - and of course, AMA.

Comments

iagooar•1h ago

And of course, if you find any bugs or feature requests, report them via issues on Github.

kissgyorgy•1h ago

There is also the llm tool written by simonwillison: https://github.com/simonw/llm

I personally use "claude -p" for this

iagooar•1h ago

Compared to the llm tool, qqqa is as lightweight as it gets. In the Ruby world it would be Sinatra, not Rails.

I have no interest in adding too many complex features. It is supposed to be fast and get out of your way.

Different philosophies.

NSPG911•1h ago

very cool, can be useful for simple commands, but i find github cli's copilot extension useful for this, i just do `ghcs <question>` and it gives me an command, i can ask it how it works, or make it better, copy it, or run it

silentsanctuary•1h ago

I like using ghcs for this as well! Or at least, I liked to - it's deprecated now, in favor of the new CLI which doesn't provide the same functionality.

https://github.com/github/gh-copilot/commit/c69ed6bf954986a0...

https://github.com/github/copilot-cli/issues/53

RamtinJ95•1h ago

This looks really cool and I love the idea but I will stick with opencode run ”query” and for specific agents which have specific models, I can just configure that also in an agent.md then add opencode run ”query” -agent quick

iagooar•1h ago

I think it is more about what it doesn’t do. It is not a coding agent. It is a lightweight assistant, Unix style “Do One Thing and Do It Well”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

CGamesPlay•1h ago

Looks interesting! Does it support multiple tool calls in a chain, or only terminating with a single tool use?

Why is there a flag to not upload my terminal history and why is that the default?

iagooar•1h ago

Thanks!

It does not support chaining multiple tool calls - if it did, it would not be a lightweight assistant anymore, I guess.

The history is there to allow referencing previous commands - but now that I think about it, it should clearly not be on by default.

Going to roll out a new version soon. Thanks for the feedback!

CGamesPlay•56m ago

Given that it doesn't support multiple tool calls, one thing I noticed that is not ideal is that it seems to buffer stdout and stderr. This means that I don't see any output if the command takes 10 minutes, and I also can't see stdout mixed with stderr. It would be ideal to actually "exec" the target process instead, honestly. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/os/unix/process/trait.CommandE...

iagooar•8m ago

This one is a bit tricky. The tool needs the output to process stuff after the AI returns results. And since the focus is on rather short interactions, this is an OK-ish tradeoff I believe. But I will give it a couple more thoughts, not saying no to it, but need to go through the possible ramifications.

armcat•1h ago

One mistake in your README - groq throughput is actually 1000 tokens per "second" (not "minute"), for gpt-oss-20b.

iagooar•54m ago

Nice catch - fixed!

flashu•1h ago

Good one, but I do not see release for MacOS :(

iagooar•53m ago

Darwin is the MacOS release - should make that clear - will update readme. Thanks.

shellfishgene•51m ago

I don't see any binaries on github?

flashu•48m ago

That was my point, nothing in releases on GH

iagooar•34m ago

The readme clearly links to releases. I am not using GH releases, but that does not mean they are not there.

krzkaczor•45m ago

This is nice. Reminds me how in warp terminal you can (could?) just type `# question` and it would call some LLM under the hood. Good UX.

iagooar•32m ago

Thank you - appreciate it. I really tried to create something simple, that solve one problem really well.

ManuelKiessling•44m ago

Hey Mateusz,

I was looking for exactly something like this, and will give it a spin right now.

But please understand that you have a huge "Trust & Safety" issue.

I've downloaded the 0.8.2 release and extracted it. When I want to run this on my macOS system, a nasty warning pops up:

“qa” Not Opened Apple could not verify “qa” is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy.

Well, fair enough; this is an early-stage project, of course the author did not (yet) jump through the Apple signing process hoops.

Let's do some basic sanity checks: the repo itself is very new, but the matisojka Github profile is established and seem alive and active in a realistic way. Author also builds Podigee, seems legit.

Alright, then let's... wait — why is the HN username iagooar; that doesn't sound even remotely like "matisojka" or "Mateusz" or "Sójka". And the HN profile references edenlm.com, not Podigee.

Okay, a cross-check with https://www.linkedin.com/in/matisojka puts the pieces together, and I'm juuuuust enough convinced that I can give this a try and add the macOS security exception...

...but you see my point, do you?

alt187•40m ago

So if the random guy who posted it on HN wasn't the OP, it would've been a thousand times more untrustworthy, obviously?

I don't see your point, and I squinted very hard.

iagooar•35m ago

And since when does publishing open source software require you to present any credentials at all? I am not hiding anything, I just published using my regular accounts - some of which I have been using for more than a decade.

iagooar•38m ago

It is highly disturbing that you would go through my private profiles and nicknames to prove what? Ever heard of nicknames on the Internet? Ever heard a person can have multiple projects over the many years?

I published an open source library, it is not even v1.0 yet.

I kindly ask you to delete this comment.

darkwater•32m ago

Private if they are on the Internet? They are not private at all. Your answer to the OP comment is frankly... wrong.

iagooar•4m ago

I guess you are partially right. Still, this feels much unsolicited.

alt187•29m ago

Frankly, I second that sentiment.

I'm not sure how extensive your search was to find OP's LinkedIn, but it's clearly not in his HN profile, and that's enough to be unwarranted imho.

hombre_fatal•30m ago

Mate, it's a free project on github they shared with us. Let's keep things in perspective.

baalimago•40m ago

For inspiration (and, ofc, PR since I'm salty that this gets attention while my pet project doesn't), you can checkout clai[0] which works very similarly but has a year or so's worth of development behind it.

So feature suggestions:

* Pipe data into qq ("cat /tmp/stacktrace | qq What is wrong with this: "),

* Profiles (qq -profile legal-analysis Please checkout document X and give feedback)

* Conversations (this is simply appending a new message to a previous query)

[0]: https://github.com/baalimago/clai/blob/main/EXAMPLES.md

iagooar•16m ago

The net is vast and more often than not we miss the good things out there.

A little anecdote: a few years ago I published an open source library that for many years would go completely underappreciated. For a few years I did not even check it - and then one day I realized it had over 500 stars on GH (+700 today). Good things take time.

Appreciate the ideas!

jakewins•9m ago

Very similar experience with several libraries. Wrote up a particularly pleasant one a few years ago: https://tech.davis-hansson.com/p/clickbait/

jcmontx•33m ago

why use this and not claude code?

iagooar•30m ago

"Do One Thing and Do It Well" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

Also, groq + gpt-oss is so much faster than Claude.

d4rkp4ttern•28m ago

I built a similar tool called “lmsh” (LM shell) that uses Claude-code non-interactive mode (hence no API keys needed, since it uses your CC subscription): it presents the shell command on a REPL like line that you can edit first and hit enter to run it. Used Rust to make it a bit snappier:

https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...

It’s pretty basic, and could be improved a lot. E.g make it use Haiku or codex-CLI with low thinking etc. Another thing is have it bypass reading CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md. (PRs anyone? ;)

iagooar•13m ago

This a pretty neat approach, indeed. Having to use the API might be an inconvenience for some people indeed. I guess having the Claude or ChatGPT subscription and using it with the CLI tools is what makes developers stick with these tools, instead of using what is out there.

buster•12m ago

I'm using https://github.com/kagisearch/ask

It's a simple shell script of 204 lines.

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