shellwhiz-7b

ShellWhiz-7B

A fine-tune of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct that turns a plain-English request into a shell command. Type what you want to do, get back find, grep, docker, git, or whatever fits.

Why this exists

I wanted something I could actually type "show me the 5 biggest files in this folder" into and get a working du/sort/head pipeline back, instead of half-remembering the flags myself. There are commercial tools that do this (Warp, some IDE plugins), but I couldn't find a small open model that just did the one thing well, so I built one.

What it's good at

Trained on 697 natural-language-to-shell-command pairs covering:

• File and directory operations (find, cp, mv, rm, chmod, du)
• Text processing (grep, sed, awk, sort, cut)
• Git workflows
• Docker and docker-compose
• Process management (ps, kill, systemctl)
• Networking (curl, ssh, scp, ping)
• Archiving and package management (tar, zip, apt, pip, npm)

Examples

These are from the actual post-training sanity check, not cherry-picked from the training set:

> find all python files modified in the last 24 hours
find <directory> -name '*.py' -mtime -1

> show me the 5 largest files in this directory
find . -type f -exec du -h {} + | sort -rh | head -5

> list all running docker containers
docker ps

The <directory> placeholder is intentional. The model was trained to use placeholders where a real path would depend on context, rather than guessing one.

Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_name = "AuricErgeson/shellwhiz-7b"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_name, torch_dtype=torch.float16, device_map="auto")

system_msg = "You are a helpful assistant that converts natural language requests into precise shell commands. Respond with ONLY the shell command, no explanation."

messages = [
    {"role": "system", "content": system_msg},
    {"role": "user", "content": "find all files larger than 100MB"},
]

inputs = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(messages, tokenize=True, add_generation_prompt=True, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs, max_new_tokens=100, temperature=0.1)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0][inputs.shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))

A GGUF (q4_k_m) build is also available in this repo if you want to run it locally through Ollama or llama.cpp.

Training details

• Base model: Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
• Method: QLoRA (4-bit), rank 16, alpha 16, no dropout
• Trainable parameters: 40,370,176 of 7,655,986,688 (0.53 percent)
• Hardware: single T4 GPU, Google Colab free tier
• Epochs: 3, 264 total steps, effective batch size 8
• Training time: about 17 minutes

Loss dropped from 2.96 at step 10 to 0.18 by the end of training and flattened out around step 190, with no spikes or divergence:

Evaluation

I ran the model against 105 held-out prompts it never saw during training, phrased differently from the training set on purpose to test generalization rather than recall. Each output was judged by Claude against a known-correct reference command, allowing for different-but-equivalent approaches (there's rarely only one right way to write a shell command).

Syntax validity (does bash -n parse it without error) came out at 100/105, or 95.2 percent. The five syntax failures were almost all cases where the model left a bracketed placeholder like <filename> or <output_file> in a spot where bash needs an actual token, which reads as a formatting habit rather than the model not understanding the command it's building.

The wrong and partial cases cluster into a few recognizable patterns, worth knowing before you rely on this for anything important:

• Hallucinated flags. A couple of failures invented flags that don't exist on the real tool (docker images --sort, pkill --exclude). These would fail immediately with an error, so at least they're not silently wrong.
• Negation and inversion. When a prompt asks for something to be turned off or a filter to be the inverse of the obvious reading, the model sometimes gets the polarity backwards (e.g. batch mode requested off, model turns it on).
• Dropped constraints on multi-part requests. Given an instruction with two or three requirements stacked together (filter by host AND connection state, auto-remove AND port map), the model sometimes satisfies one and quietly drops another.
• Leftover placeholders when a real value was given. A few outputs used <image_name>:<tag> style placeholders even when the prompt spelled out a concrete value like nginx:latest.

None of this is surprising for 700 training examples on a 7B model, but it's worth knowing which categories to double check rather than trusting blindly.

Dataset

The training data is published separately at AuricErgeson/text-to-shell-dataset, generated synthetically and deduplicated on instruction text.