If you want to use AI for coding, there are plenty of tools to choose from. Popular options include GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Gemini. But what if you’d rather not send your code to external services? Now that computers are becoming more powerful, is it possible to run a large language model locally and use it as your own coding assistant?
To get the names of columns in a table or the keys of a record you can use the columns command. The command returns a list of string values that are the column or key names. When the input is table the column names are returned, and when the input is a record the names of the keys are returned.
Groovy (and Java) support using names for groups in regular expressions. The name of the group is defined using the syntax ?<name> where name must be replaced with the actual group name. This is very useful, because you can use the group name to access the value that is captured by the defined regular expression in a java.util.regex.Matcher object. Groovy supports for a long time accessing a group using the index operator. Since Groovy 5 you can use the name of the group to access the value as well. You can specify the name between square brackets ([<name>]) or use the name as property.
The build-in HTTP client in Nushell can be used to interact with REST APIs and websites. If the URL you want to invoke has query parameters than you can use the url build-query command. The url build-query command transforms a record or table to URL encoded key/value pairs joined with an ampersand (&). Each key and value is separated by an equal sign (=). The command can expand a key with a list value to separate key/value pairs with the same key if the key is defined in a record.
The string module contains a lot of useful commands to work with strings. If you want to join several values from a list into a single string you can use the str join command. The command accepts as argument the character(s) to use for joining the values. If you don’t specify the character(s) as argument the default value '' (empty string) is used.
