`wut` Terminal Assistant

Overview

The wut terminal assistant uses LLMs to parse your terminal's scrollback, helping you troubleshoot your last command.

Expectations

We found that wut works nicely with the Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-Hybrid model.

It is not especially convenient to use wut with Windows until the developers remove the requirement for tmux, however we do provide instructions for getting set up on Windows in this guide.

wut seems to send the entire terminal scrollback to the LLM, which can produce very long prompts that exceed the LLM's context length. We recommend restricting the terminal scrollback or using a fresh tmux session when trying this out.

Setup

Prerequisites

Install Lemonade Server

Install Lemonade Server by following the Lemonade Server Instructions and using the installer .exe.

Installing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

wut currently requires a tmux terminal in order to function. We found the simplest way to achieve this on Windows was through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Install Windows Subsystem for Linux.
Open the WSL Settings app, navigate to Networking, and make sure the Networking mode is Mirrored. This is required for WSL terminals to be able to see the Lemonade server running in Windows.
If needed: shut down WSL to make sure the changes apply:

wsl --shutdown

Installing Wut

Start a WSL terminal.
Install pipx, as recommended by the following wut instructions:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install pipx
pipx ensurepath

Re-launch your terminal to make sure pipx is available, then install wut:

pipx install wut-cli

Add wut's required environment variables to your .bashrc file:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="-"
export OPENAI_MODEL="Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-Hybrid"
export OPENAI_BASE_URL="http://localhost:8000/api/v1"

Usage

Start a terminal

Start a WSL terminal.
Start a tmux session:

tmux

Then, try some of these example commands that wut can help explain.

Help with Lemonade Server

People often ask exactly what Lemonade Server's models endpoint does. Fortunately, wut is able to intuit the answer!

curl http://localhost:8000/api/v1/models
wut

The terminal response of the curl command is this (only intelligible by machines):

curl http://localhost:8000/api/v1/models
{"object":"list","data":[{"id":"Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-CPU","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"},{"id":"Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-Hybrid","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"},{"id":"Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct-Hybrid","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"},{"id":"Phi-3-Mini-Instruct-Hybrid","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"},{"id":"Qwen-1.5-7B-Chat-Hybrid","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"},{"id":"DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-Hybrid","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"},{"id":"DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B-Hybrid","created":1744226681,"object":"model","owned_by":"lemonade"}]}

But wut does a nice job interpreting:

The output suggests that the API endpoint is returning a list of models, and the owned_by field indicates that all models are owned by "lemonade". Thecreated timestamp indicates when each model was created.

The output is a valid JSON response, and there is no error or warning message. The command was successful, and the output can be used for further processing or analysis.

Bad Git Command

Run a command that doesn't exist, and then ask wut for help:

git pull-request
wut

Results in:

git: 'pull-request' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

And then wut provides some helpful feedback:

Key takeaway: The command git pull-request is not a valid Git command. The correct command to create a pull request is git request-pull, but it's not a standard Git command. The output wut is the name of the activated Conda environment. To create a pull request, use git request-pull or git pull with the --pr option.

wut Terminal Assistant