Processing Dynamic User Input in Local AI Scripts

Hardcoded prompts are great for testing, but a truly useful script needs to respond to dynamic user input. This lesson shows you how to make your local AI script interactive by capturing command-line arguments.

You'll learn how to use Node.js's built-in parseArgs utility to take a user's natural language command directly from the terminal and pass it to your local language model for processing.

Workflow demonstrated in this lesson:

Import the parseArgs function from the node:util module.
Configure parseArgs to accept positional arguments from the command line.
Replace the static, hardcoded prompt with the dynamic input provided by the user.
Run the script with different sentences (e.g., "Download a file" or "I want to download a file") to demonstrate that the AI can correctly infer the core command regardless of the phrasing.

By the end of this short lesson, your script will be able to accept and process commands directly from the user, making it a flexible and reusable command-line tool.

Transcript

[00:00] Now let's take user input by importing from nodeutil, parseArgs, and we can use parseArgs and pass in allowPositionals true, then grab the positionals. So now the prompt, instead of being hardcoded, can be positionals in the first position. So when I run this, if I type on index and then type a string like download a file, then this is the positional at index 0. I'll hit enter and you'll see the command is download. Now just to prove that this isn't just finding the first word in here, we can type index.

[00:36] I want to download a file. Hit enter and it still finds the word download.

Processing Dynamic User Input in Local AI Scripts

John Lindquist

Scripting Local Language Models with Ollama and the Vercel AI SDK

Transcript