Haunted Terminal: a local Gemma model whispers eerie shell commentary

A developer built Haunted Terminal, a Bash hook that, roughly one command in four, prints a short eerie remark about the command just run and whether it failed. The tool pairs a small Bash script with a standard-library Python helper that queries a locally hosted Gemma model through Ollama, so no cloud API, account, or key is needed. Keeping inference on the machine matters because shell histories can contain hostnames, paths, and accidentally pasted tokens. Benchmarks on a CPU-only, 16-core machine showed the 4B model responding in about 2 seconds when warm versus about 9 seconds for the 12B model, and the author settled on 4B as the default. The author also noted that a cold-started 12B model could exceed the request timeout and silently suppress output.