Project: Weather CLI

Source: 0-weather/
Model: gemma4:26b
Type: Bash script

The Prompt

write a bash script that uses wget to get the weather in new york city

That’s it. One sentence. No clarifying questions, no spells — just a straightforward request.

The Model’s Reasoning

The model immediately recognized that wget alone can’t render a weather webpage. It considered three options:

• wttr.in (chosen) — designed specifically for CLI weather, returns plain text
• Weather APIs (rejected) — requires API keys, adds friction
• Scraping a site (rejected) — fragile and difficult with just wget

It settled on wttr.in with the ?format=3 parameter for a single-line summary, then added error handling for missing wget and failed downloads.

The Code

#!/bin/bash

# Define the location (New York City)
# Use underscores instead of spaces for the URL
LOCATION="New_York"

# The URL for the weather service
# wttr.in is a great service that provides terminal-friendly output
URL="https://wttr.in/${LOCATION}?format=3"

# Check if wget is installed
if ! command -v wget &> /dev/null; then
    echo "Error: 'wget' is not installed. Please install it to use this script."
    exit 1
fi

echo "--- Fetching Weather for $LOCATION ---"

# Use wget to fetch the data
# -q: quiet mode (hides download progress)
# -O-: sends the downloaded content to 'stdout' (the terminal) instead of a file
WEATHER_DATA=$(wget -qO- "$URL")

# Check if the download was successful
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "$WEATHER_DATA"
else
    echo "Error: Failed to retrieve weather data. Check your internet connection."
    exit 1
fi

echo "---------------------------------------"

How to Run

chmod +x 0-weather/code
./0-weather/code

Or install it as a system command:

sudo mv 0-weather/code /usr/local/bin/weather
weather

How to Customize

Change the LOCATION variable to any city:

LOCATION="Tokyo"
LOCATION="London"
LOCATION="San_Francisco"    # use underscores for spaces

For a full ASCII-art weather report instead of a one-liner, remove the ?format=3 from the URL:

URL="https://wttr.in/${LOCATION}"

Key Lessons

• The model knows about APIs. It recognized wttr.in as the right tool for CLI weather without being told.
• Simple prompts can work when the task is well-defined and the solution space is narrow.
• Error handling matters even in tiny scripts — checking for wget and failed downloads makes it robust.
• The model adds polish. A one-sentence prompt produced commented, error-handled, production-ready bash.

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