--- title: Ask a computer! A toy powered by GPT-3 and reckless abandon author: George Mandis date: 2022-12-15 tags: post, post, computer, hacks, gpt-3 --- I made an ill-advised toy that you really should not use: * It's a tool that you can use for natural-language queries from the command-line asking your computer questions about your system. Watch it in action: Behind the scenes it works like this: * We ask OpenAI to look at the prompt and generate a command-line script for a specified platform that's most likely to return information we could use to answer the question. * **‼️ The completely reckless part**: Whatever that returns, we run and collect the output. * We take the output from that command-line script and ask OpenAI to now try and answer the original prompt based on the information the script provided. It works remarkably well for certain types of queries: * What type of monitor do I have connected? (This was actually a genuine question I had and the impetus for the end-of-day, cowboy-coded hack) * Do I need to charge my battery? What's it at? * When was the last time I restarted this machine? * How many packages did I install with `brew`? * Which ports are currently in use? * Am I running any Nodejs processes right now? * Do I have any system updates waiting to be installed? * Tell me about the (processor/gpu/peripherals/etc)? **Caveat emptor:** You could *really* screw something up here if you're not careful! I added debug and a dry-run mode that doesn't actually execute the command (but shows you what it *would* have run). But if you asked it to do something like "Delete all the important system files" it... 100% would try to. So don't. Please. Or... do and tell me about it! 😈 (Just don't blame me! 🙈) **Update**: I've setup a project over at Glitch that you could remix and run remotely: * That is *probably* a little safer, though might be less sastifying and/or capable. Just change the `platform` variable to `"Ubuntu"`.