Context

The three levels

context: light    # none | light | full

Or for one call:

smartly --context none show me the largest files here

none

Your sentence, plus three facts about the machine the command will run on: the OS, your shell, and whether common tools like sed, date and stat are the GNU or BSD variants. Nothing about your directory, your repository or your history.

Use it when the request is self-contained, or when you are in a directory whose file names you would rather not send anywhere.

light — the default

Adds a capped directory listing plus git branch, status and worktree information. This is what lets a vague request resolve against reality:

git branch --merged main | grep -vE '^\*| main$' | xargs git branch -d

smartly could not have produced that pipeline without knowing your branches and what has already merged.

full

Everything in light, plus a tail of your recent shell history — $HISTFILE, or ~/.zsh_history / ~/.bash_history depending on your shell.

Why smartly checks your tools

On a Mac, “BSD” is only a default. With Homebrew’s coreutils ahead on your PATH, date and stat are GNU while sed is still BSD, and the right flags differ for each: date -d against date -v, stat -c against stat -f, and whether a sed block needs ; before its closing }. So smartly runs --version on sed, grep, find, xargs, awk, date and stat (a few milliseconds, in parallel) and tells the model which variant each one is. Only the variant names are sent, e.g. sed=BSD date=GNU, not paths or versions.

Choosing a level

light is the default because it is the level at which requests like “it”, “all worktrees except main” and “the log file in here” start working. If that is not worth sending a directory listing for a particular request, use --context none for that request rather than changing the default.