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Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

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Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#111

Post by tptacek »

simonw wrote: post #105
sarbajitsaha wrote: post #93

How is codex now compared to Claude code? Especially with gpt 5 high for planning and codex for the coding part.

Codex CLI had some huge upgrades in the past few months. Before the GPT-5 release it was a poor imitation IMO - in the macOS terminal it somehow even disabled copy and paste! Codex today is almost unrecognizable in comparison to that version. It's really good. I use both it and Claude Code almost interchangeably at the moment and I'm not really feeling that one is notably better than the other.

My terminal agent is a Go bubbletea app and it too disables copy/paste and I haven't bothered to figure out why. Of course, I am also not the 5th most visited site on the Internet (more's the pity).

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#112

Post by ryancnelson »

This really resonated with me, it's echoing the way i've come to appreciate Claude-code in a terminal for working in/on/with unix-y hosts.

A trick I use often with this pattern is (for example): 'you can run shell commands. Use tmux to find my session named "bingo", and view the pane in there. you can also use tmux to send that pane keystrokes. when you run shell commands, please run them in that tmux pane so i can watch. Right now that pane is logged into my cisco router..."

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#113

Post by [deleted] »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #79
lupusreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The light switch moment for me is when I realized I can tell claude to use linters instead of telling it to look for problems itself. The later generally works but having it call tools is way more efficient. I didn't even tell it what linters to use, I asked it for suggestions and it gave me about a dozen of suggestions, I installed them and it started using them without further instruction. I had tried coding with C…

As an extension of this idea: for some tasks, rather than asking Claude Code to do a thing, you can often get better results from asking Claude Code to write and run a script to do the thing . Example: read this log file and extract XYZ from it and show me a table of the results. Instead of having the agent read in the whole log file into the context and try to process it with raw LLM attention, you can get it to rea…

[deleted]

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#114

Post by phainopepla2 »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #108
sarbajitsaha wrote: post #93

How is codex now compared to Claude code? Especially with gpt 5 high for planning and codex for the coding part.

I've found GPT-5-Codex (the model used by default by OpenAI Codex CLI) to be superior but, as others have stated, slower. Caveat, requires a linux environment, OSX, or WSL. In general, I find that it will write smarter code, perform smarter refactors, and introduce less chaos into my codebase. I'm not talking about toy codebases. I use agents on large codebases with dozens of interconnected tools and projects. Claude…

Codex-cli doesn't require Linux or WSL. I've been using it on Windows all week. That said, the model seems to get confused by Powershell from time to time, but who doesn't?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#115

Post by guy_5676 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #67
gchamonlive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I on the other hand think it's irrelevant if a technology is a blackbox or not. If it's supposed to fit the opensource/FOSS model of the original post having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights. It's fine for models to have open-weights and closed data. It's only barely fitting the opensource model IMHO though.

The point of FOSS is control. You want to have access to the source, including build instructions and everything, in order to be able to meaningfully change the program, and understand what it actually does (or pay an expert to do this for you). You also want to make sure that the company that made this doesn't have a monopoly on fixing it for you, so that they can't ask you for exorbitant sums to address an issue yo…

I'm not an expert on this tech, so I could be talking out my ass, but what you are saying here doesn't ring completely true to me. I'm an avid consumer of stable-diffusion based models. The community is very easily able to train adaptations to the network that push it in a certain direction, to the point you consistently get the model to produce specific types of output (e.g. perfectly replicating the style of a well known artist).

I have also seen people train "jailbreaks" of popular open source LLMs (e.g. Google Gemma) that remove the condescending ethical guidelines and just let you talk to the thing normally.

So all in all I am skeptical of the claim that there would be no value in having access to the training data. Clearly there is some ability to steer the direction of the output these models produce.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#116

Post by ozim »

maleldil wrote: post #96
jamie_ca wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running linters for formatting etc, just get the agent to run them on autocorrect and it doesn't need to know the status as urgently.

That's just one part of it. I want the LLM to see type checking errors, failing test outputs, etc.

Errors shouldn’t be on stdout ;)

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#117

Post by diggan »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #114
dudeinhawaii wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found GPT-5-Codex (the model used by default by OpenAI Codex CLI) to be superior but, as others have stated, slower. Caveat, requires a linux environment, OSX, or WSL. In general, I find that it will write smarter code, perform smarter refactors, and introduce less chaos into my codebase. I'm not talking about toy codebases. I use agents on large codebases with dozens of interconnected tools and projects. Claude…

Codex-cli doesn't require Linux or WSL. I've been using it on Windows all week. That said, the model seems to get confused by Powershell from time to time, but who doesn't?

You should really try it in WSL or proper Linux, the experience is vastly different. I've mostly been using Codex (non-interactively though) for a long time on Linux. I tried it out on Windows just the other day for the first time and quoting + PowerShell seems to really confuse it. It was borderline unusable for me as it spent most of the reasoning figuring out the right syntax of the tooling, on Linux there is barely anything of that.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#118

Post by simonw »

tptacek wrote: post #111
simonw wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codex CLI had some huge upgrades in the past few months. Before the GPT-5 release it was a poor imitation IMO - in the macOS terminal it somehow even disabled copy and paste! Codex today is almost unrecognizable in comparison to that version. It's really good. I use both it and Claude Code almost interchangeably at the moment and I'm not really feeling that one is notably better than the other.

My terminal agent is a Go bubbletea app and it too disables copy/paste and I haven't bothered to figure out why. Of course, I am also not the 5th most visited site on the Internet (more's the pity).

One workaround I found as using iTerm2 instead of Terminal.app and then using a weird keyboard combo, I think it was Cmd + Option + mouse drag.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#119

Post by sneak »

warkdarrior wrote: post #73
sneak wrote: post #40

I implore people who are willing and able to send the contents and indices of their private notes repository to cloud based services to rethink their life decisions. Not around privacy, mind you. If your notes contain nothing that you wouldn’t mind being subpoenaed or read warrantlessly by the DHS/FBI, then you are wasting your one and only life.

So your goal in your one and only life is to write notes in your code repo that you don't want subpoenaed?

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” —Oscar Wilde

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#120

Post by luhsprwhkv2 »

The Claude and Obsidian combo is great. You can offload all the hard parts of managing the workflow to the robots. I've taken to analyzing my daily notes—a stream-of-consciousness mind dump—for new Zettel notes, projects, ideas, and so on. Gemini does just fine, too, though.
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