What’s whats?

Yesterday i was working extensively on a project called whats. unfortunately it was happily abandoned in the favour of other llm based command line explainers like explainshell

Why abandon :(

The reason for that is that there is no consistent way to parse a man page and –help output because each tool has its own way of writing it and also the manpages have their own standards like mdoc and man, GNU legacy pages are easy, Tar goes crazy on the other hand, breaking my tool everytime.

I accepted that continuing to build this tool will result in the usage of various wierd ways to achieve it, I even went to the point of trying out probability heuristics to get the result to the point of even thinking of using Machine Learning. And thats when i thought i should just stop.

See, the main reason for building whats was to NOT use LLM but i guess manpages weren’t meant to be ‘parsed’.

I was happy tho while building with the 24 upvotes on reddit, 4 stars on github but i decided to delete the repo and the post and added a note saying they should use any other tool like explainshell or something else.

thx