🖥💬 Ask a computer!

Ask your computer natural-language questions about itself from the command line! Powereed by GPT-3 and reckless abandon.

• 🎬 Watch the demo on YouTube!

🛑 Caveat emptor: This is dangerous! You probably shouldn't use this without a deep understanding of all the ways it could go wrong! I am not responsible for anything that breaks or goes wrong if you try to use this.

Why it's dangerous: This script will ask GPT-3 to generate a command-line script for your system and run it blindly. This is a terrible idea—a proper production version of this should be carefully santiized and monitored.

Update: I've setup a project over at Glitch that you could remix and run remotely:

• https://glitch.com/edit/#!/ask-a-computer

That is probably a little safer, though might be less sastifying and/or capable. Just change the platform variable to "Ubuntu".

What kind of questions can I ask?

That said... it works pretty well (in my experience) for questions like this:

• How much ram does this machine have?
• What type of monitor do I have connected?
• Tell me about my displays
• Tell me about this computer
• Which peripherals do I have connected right now?
• Which bluetooth devices are connected?
• What kind of machine am I running
• What is the operating system?
• What is my battery at?
• Do I need to charge my battery?
• Do I have any system updates waiting to be installed?
• How many packages did I install with brew?
• How many versions of nodejs do I have installed on this machine?
• What version of Python am I running?
• When was the last time I restarted this computer?
• How many process are running right now?
• Which ports are currently in use?
• Do I have __ installed on this machine?
• How much free memory do I have?
• How big is my hard drive and how much space do I have?
• Am I running any Docker containers right now?
• Am I running any nodejs processes right now?
• What process is using the most memory right now on my machine?

Requirements:

• Node 19.1+
• An OpenAI account and API token stored as an environmental variable

Getting started

• Run npm install or yarn from the project root
• Get an API token from OpenAI
• Set the value for an environmental variale called OPENAI_API_TOKEN to this token
• Important → Update the platform variable in index.js to match your system (default is macOS)
• run npm run start or yarn start from the root folder. You can also run debug or safe to automatically pass in flags that will surface more logging and protect you from yourself.

Flags

There are 2 flags that can be passed in:

• --debug will show helpful debugging information including raw responses from OpenAI, the command it tries to execute and more-detailed error messages
• --dry-run will request a command from OpenAI but not actually run it