qqqa
A fast, stateless LLM-powered assistant for your shell
Details
- External ID
- 45833811
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- qqqa
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Nov. 6, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 165
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9388646288209607
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I built qqqa as an open-source project, because I was tired of bouncing between shell, ChatGPT / the browser for rather simple commands. It comes with two binaries: qq and qa.qq means "quick question" - it is read-only, perfect for the commands I always forget.qa means "quick agent" - it is qq's sibling that can run things, but only after showing its plan and getting an approval by the user.It is built entirely around the Unix philosophy of focused tools, stateless by default - pretty much the opposite of what most coding agent are focusing on.Personally I've had the best experience using Groq + gpt-oss-20b, as it feels almost instant (up to 1k tokens/s according to Groq) - but any OpenAI-compatible API will do.Curious if the HN crowd finds it useful - and of course, AMA.
Enrichment
- Theme
- developer tools for AI agents
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- llm-powered shell assistant
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It consists of simple CLI binaries that make stateless calls to an LLM API to return command explanations or run simple shell workflows.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: gptme, llm-cmd-comp, aichat, sgpt, llm (Simon Willison's datasette tool)
Concerns raised: Potential for abuse with rate limiting and API costs, Need for another paid API key subscription, Git repository bloat from binary files, Privacy implications with upstream LLM providers logging data
Feature requests: Support for CC/credit card subscription instead of API keys, Summarize conversation into words as identifier instead of hash, Copy-to-clipboard functionality for proposed commands, Preserve full shell history for all commands
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 56 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 57 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Looks like the first mover among its competitors.
- FreeQRUnlimited · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Run AI coding agents in real, local sandboxes, not Git worktrees · hn · 2026-04-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Run coding agents in microVM sandboxes instead of your host machine · hn · 2026-04-23 · 63 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- ShellTalk brings deterministic text-to-bash · hn · 2026-04-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- QuickQR · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Cq · hn · 2026-03-23 · 225 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Cynative · hn · 2026-07-28 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- AQQAI · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.