A 1,000-Line Deterministic Terminal Assistant Argues Most Command Lookups Never Needed an LLM

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TERMy, part of the NPC-Forge project, translates natural-language requests into shell commands using no model at all: noise stripping, sentiment analysis, exact match, template match, then probabilistic fallback via IDF, bag-of-words and IDF-weighted Levenshtein for typos. Knowledge lives in a custom NDF 0.0 JSON format holding intents, input variations, tool calls and permission gates, with destructive commands gated behind an ask. It is about 1,000 lines of Python and JavaScript, answers in milliseconds CPU-only, and runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero. Worth calibrating: the NPC-Forge repo was created July 18, 2026 and has 187 stars, so the Show HN is a surfacing rather than a first release.