zyzx

Inspiration

AI-powered tools are changing the way developers think about programming incredibly quickly. Less than two years after its official launch, Copilot's become integral to the programming experience—for its users, over half of the code they write is generated by Copilot.

But the terminal, another key component of the developer experience, has remained largely untouched. We found ourselves frustrated with having to constantly switch back and forth being ChatGPT sessions and terminal windows, trying to find the right context to paste in, and still needing to resort to documentation and manpages to debug unfamiliar commands. Beyond that, we wanted a private, personalized solution—one that could learn from our commands, be as "terminal-literate" as possible, and didn't rely on closed models like OpenAI's. We wanted a copilot that (1) integrated directly into the terminal, with UX as seamless as possible, (2) could learn from our commands and become a personalized assistant, and (3) worked offline and open-source, unlike most of the proprietary, closed solutions that are widespread today.

So we built zyzx, a copilot that does just that.

What it does

zyzx works as a tiny executable that you can invoke right from your shell

How we built it

We built it in Zig!

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges; this was our first time working with the language Zig, and we also ran into many challenges training the model.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have a functional terminal!

What we learned

We learned a lot about compile time optimization and Zig.

What's next for zyzx

More commands!

Built With

• zig