Prompting Large Language Models In Bash Scripts

I’ve been ex­per­i­ment­ing with us­ing LLMs lo­cally for gen­er­at­ing datasets to test Harper against. I might write a blog post about the tech­nique (which I am grandiosely call­ing “LLM-assisted fuzzing”), but I’m go­ing to make you wait.

I’ve writ­ten a lit­tle tool called ofc that lets you in­sert Ollama into your bash scripts. I think it’s pretty neat, since it (very eas­ily) lets you do some pretty cool things.

For ex­am­ple, you can swap out the sys­tem prompt, so if you want to com­pare be­hav­ior across prompts, you can just toss it in a loop:

#!/bin/bash

subreddits=("r/vscode" "r/neovim" "r/wallstreetbets")

# Loop over each item in the list
for subreddit in "${subreddits[@]}"; do
  echo "++++++++ BEGIN $subreddit ++++++++"
  ofc --system-prompt "Assume the persona of a commenter of $subreddit" "What is your opinion on pepperjack cheese?"
  cat
done

Or, you can in­struct a model to prompt it­self:

ofc --system-prompt "$(ofc "Write a prompt for a large language model that makes it think harder. ")" "What is a while loop?"

Installation

ofc is in­stal­lable from ei­ther crates.io or its repos­i­tory.

cargo install ofc --locked

# Or...
cargo install --git https://github.com/elijah-potter/ofc --locked