This is my open question to the GNU/Linux community. You people are supposed to be intelligent, but you seem to be crack. Why?

I wrote a cool utility that marries the shell and LLMs — one of the oldest pieces of software paired with the newest. It’s called esh. You just type in plain English, and the LLM translates it to shell commands for you. I posted it on r/linux, and people trashed it. I gave replies, but rather than reply back, they complained to the moderators.

This should be science, not politics! I thought GNU/Linux groups were a scientific endeavour, never a political one. It’s okay to say I made trash, but when I counter it, counter my counter — if you’ve got the guts. Don’t be a coward!

As shown in the Reddit thread, maybe people just don’t know the power of LLMs. There seem to be a lot of luddites, even in the tech community — a lot of people who don’t know about LLMs. I’m a bit appalled by their ignorance. So okay, look at this:

❯ esh -x "what type of files are present in the Pictures directory?"

Maybe you’re a GNU/Linux guru and you know exactly what to type into the shell, and I don’t. But then why do I need to know it in 2026? The above gave me a lot of results, so I refined it as shown:

❯ esh -x "what type of files are present in the Pictures directory? Just list the unique types."
find ~/Pictures -type f -exec file -b {} \; | cut -d: -f2 | cut -d, -f1 | sort -u
Run this command? [y/N] y
cut: stdin: Illegal byte sequence
 "CREATOR
 "GoodFon.ru"
 [none]x[none]
 [TIFF image data
 MPEG ADTS
Apple binary property list
Apple Desktop Services Store
ASCII text
data
empty
EPUB document
GIF image data
GIMP XCF image data
JPEG image data
Matlab v4 mat-file (little endian) d
Matlab v4 mat-file (little endian) R
PDF document
PNG image data
RIFF (little-endian) data
SQLite 3.x database
SQLite Write-Ahead Log
SVG Scalable Vector Graphics image
very short file (no magic)
XML 1.0 document text
Zip archive data

Bingo, I got it. Even if you’re a GNU/Linux guru, I bet it would have taken you, say, 10-15 seconds to type the command above — you might make mistakes, things might need correcting, and so on. You’re human: biology, made of molecules, slow. I use electrons and photons — fast, the fundamental matter that builds this universe. Duhhh!

I am really surprised that GNU/Linux people don’t see that.