Execution and safety

Auto-run is the default

This is intentional. The product is “say what you want and it happens”, and a prompt on every invocation defeats that. It is also the setting most worth reconsidering on a machine where a wrong rm costs you something.

Three ways to change it, from most to least permanent:

# ~/.config/smartly/config.yaml — every call, from now on
execution:
  mode: confirm

smartly --confirm remove every merged branch    # this call only
smartly --dry-run remove every merged branch    # print it, run nothing

Execution mode

auto (default)

Generate and run immediately, no prompt.

confirm

Print the command and ask [y/N] before running it.

The prompt reads from and writes to /dev/tty directly rather than stdin and stdout, so it works even when stdin is otherwise in use — including under the shell wrapper, which captures stdout.

If no controlling terminal is available — CI, cron, a fully non-interactive pipe — confirm mode fails closed. It will not run the command, rather than hang or silently proceed. Use -y/--yes in those contexts if you genuinely want it to run.

Per-invocation overrides

--confirm and -y/--yes are mutually exclusive.

--dry-run is the one to reach for when you are unsure what a phrasing will produce. It is also the safest way to explore a new provider or model.

smartly --dry-run clean up everything in build that is older than a week

What smartly does not promise

• It does not review the generated command for danger. There is no blocklist and no destructive-command detector.
• Its output sanitizer enforces that the response is exactly one clean command line, and rejects anything else. That is a defence against a malformed model response, not a judgement about what the command does.
• It generates one command line. Pipes, && and redirects inside that line are fine, and are as consequential as anything else you would type.

If a request is one you would think twice about typing yourself, use --dry-run first.

Logging

Every generate-and-run invocation is appended to log.path as JSONL:

• one request record — sentence, provider, model, generated command, outcome;
• and once the command’s exit code is known, a separate completion record, correlated by request_id.

The log is append-only. Nothing is ever rewritten in place, and the file is created with 0600 permissions.

Move it, or read it, with the path from your config:

log:
  path: ~/.config/smartly/history.log

smartly config path                       # where the config file is
tail -n 20 ~/.config/smartly/history.log  # the last few records