Recipes

These are copy-paste workflows that pipe Less Software tools together — and sometimes into sqlite3, jq, strip-tags, or llm — to do surprisingly useful things. Everything runs locally. No API keys, no cloud, no heavy runtimes.

Web & Text

Detect language for a webpage tezcatl · lingua ●○○ Extract emails from a webpage tezcatl · lingua ●○○ Sentiment-check a webpage's copy tezcatl · lingua ●●○ Proofread a webpage tezcatl · lingua ●○○ Define a word from the terminal lingua ●○○ Style-check a draft before publishing lingua ●○○ Translate any JS-rendered page locally tezcatl ●●○

Audio & Speech

Transcribe audio and extract action items stenographer ●●○ Identify what language someone is speaking stenographer · lingua ●○○ Classify the sounds in an audio file cacophony ●○○

Location & Local Data

Find coffee near you whereami · nearme ●○○ Two-line pizza database whereami · nearme ●●○ Walking tour generator whereami · nearme ●●○

Vision & Structured Data

Business card scanner loupe · lingua ●●○ Make calendar entry from an event flyer loupe ●●● Receipt OCR with structured total loupe ●●○

Automation

Clipboard language detector hotkey fulton · copycat · lingua ●●○ Hotkey: summarize your clipboard fulton · copycat ●●○ Hotkey: translate your clipboard fulton · copycat ●●○ Hotkey: extract todos from your clipboard fulton · copycat ●●○ Extract entities from your clipboard copycat · lingua ●○○ Proofread your clipboard lingua ●○○ Block commits when your docs have typos lingua ●●○ Grammar-check your last commit message lingua ●○○ Scrape, detect, translate, summarize tezcatl · lingua ●●● Voice to structured action items stenographer ●●●

Ideas & Directions

These are less-tested ideas that hint at where composable CLI tools could go. Some are waiting for refinements to the tools. Others are just waiting for someone to try them.

Real-time streaming action items — Pipe stenographer listen --json (streaming NDJSON) into an LLM per-utterance for live action item extraction. The batch version above works great; the real-time version needs deduplication logic to handle partial updates cleanly.
Comprehensive local place database — Shift coordinates and radius to sweep a full city, piping nearme results into SQLite and deduplicating as you go. The two-line pizza database, scaled up.
Voice-controlled Mac — stenographer listen | llm "convert to a poltergeist command" | sh — spoken instructions become accessibility API actions on your desktop.
Sound-triggered journaling — Run cacophony listen as a background daemon that logs timestamped environmental sounds over a day. A sonic diary of your workspace.
Dashboard screenshot to metric alerts — tezcatl --screenshot=dash.png a monitoring page, loupe ocr dash.png the image, and pipe to llm "extract KPIs and flag anomalies". Observability without a browser tab.
Neighborhood briefing — Run multiple nearme queries (restaurants, parks, transit, groceries) from your current location and pipe them all to llm for a neighborhood profile.

Share Your Recipes

If you come up with a recipe using these tools, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line at [email protected].