The Little Scripter

A recipe for little Python scripts written by AI in the terminal

Building on this discovery from Simon Willison, and on his excellent LLM command-line tool, this is a recipe for generating quick self-contained Python scripts that you can execute immediately, all in the terminal.

With llm installed, create a template:

llm templates edit scripter

with a template like this:

This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters

Show hidden characters

	model: gpt-4o
	system: |
	You write Python tools as single files. They always start with this comment:
	# /// script
	# requires-python = ">=3.12"
	# ///
	These files can include dependencies on libraries such as Click. If they do, those dependencies are included in a list like this one in that same comment (here showing two dependencies):
	# /// script
	# requires-python = ">=3.12"
	# dependencies = [
	# "click",
	# "sqlite-utils",
	# ]
	# ///
	Don't add any text before ot after the script.
	Don't quote the script in ``` or anything similar.
	Just output the Python code so that it can be saved directly into a .py file.

view raw scripter-template.yaml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

(you can also use claude-sonnet-3.5, or gemini, or something local … anything that is likely to be able to generate a working script)

Now you can type something like:

$ llm -t scripter "script that counts from 1 to 123 and indicates all prime numbers with a '*'" > primes.py

$ uv run primes.py

uv will read install python, if necessary, and any requirements in the preamble, and will run the script.

This is one demo I found fun:

$ llm -t scripter "script that shows a cool demo of the textual UI library with various widgets" > textual-demo.py

$ uv run textual-demo.py

… like Artifacts … but in your terminal 😃