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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

#131

Post by mediaman »

drdaeman wrote: post #129
pixl97 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you are also a large proprietary monolith. I can't exactly take the run a shell part of your brain and leave the 8 hours of sleep part out. That seemingly is a limitation of intelligence we've not got around yet. The fact that the AI interpreter will use small commands makes it very useful.

Uh, my only objection way about talking about Claude Code as “UNIX way/philosophy”. While there are some similarities, they’re nowhere sufficient to call it so. (As far as I’m aware our brains are opposite of UNIX, starting right from the fact they had evolved and were not designed at all. And the article is about Claude and not me.)

The purpose is not so much Claude Code, but that LLMs running semi-autonomously in a shell environment with access to Unix tools are powerful in a way that a web chatbot is not. Replace Claude Code with some other TUI such as opencode and, modulo some of the specifics of CC's implementation, the truth still stands.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#132

Post by ryandrake »

nyrikki wrote: post #88
MisterTea wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. Obviously not around during the 90's when the GUI was blowing up thanks to Windows displacing costly commercial Unix machines (Sun, SGI, HP, etc.) By 2000 people were saying Unix was dead and the GUI was the superior interface to a computer. Visual Basic was magic to a lot of people and so many programs were GUI things ev…

That is a bit of a simplification, many users found value in wysiwyg, there was an aborted low-code visual programming movement. Microsoft drank early OOP koolaid and thus powershell suffered from problems that were well covered by the time etc… Ray Norda being pushed out after WordPerfect bought Novell with their own money and leveraged local religious politics in addition to typical corporate politics killed it. In…

This is kind of my "CLI bigotry" showing, but I think programming was always, quite naturally, a command-line occupation, but there was this brief period starting in the late 90s where a sizable number of practitioners were seduced by things like Visual Studio and Eclipse, and went over to the dark side. But nature is slowly restoring itself, and we're moving back to software development being text based tools inside a bunch of terminals, like god intended.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#133

Post by SamPatt »

One point to add about integration between LLMs and Obsidian: plugins.

Obsidian has a plugin system that can be easily customized. You can run your own JS scripts from a local folder. Claude Code is excellent at creating and modifying them on the fly.

For example, I built a custom program that syncs Obsidian files with a publish flag to my Github repo, which triggers a netlify build. My website updates when I update my vault and run a sync.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#134

Post by alexchantavy »

posix86 wrote: post #107
libraryofbabel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cursor does this for me already all the time though, give that another shot maybe. For refactoring tasks in particular; it uses regex to find interesting locations , and the other day after maybe 10 of slow "ok now let me update this file... ok now let me update this file..." it suddenly paused, looked at the pattern so far, and then decided to write a python script to do the refactoring & executed it. For some reaso…

+1, cursor and Claude code do this automatically for me. Take a big analysis task and they’ll write python scripts to find the needles in the haystacks that I’m looking through

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#135

Post by array_key_first »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #85

All GUI apps are different, each being unhappy in its own way. Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. CLI is a common ground, an integration plaza where the peers meet, streams flow and signals are exchanged. No commitment needs to be made to enter this information bazaar. The closest analog in the GUI world is Smalltalk, but again - you need to pledge your allegiance bef…

We have systems for highly interoperable and compostable GUI applications - think NextSTEP or, modern day, dbus, to a lesser extent.

Really, GUIs can be formed of a public API with graphics slapped on top. They usually aren't, but they can be.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#136

Post by antonvs »

array_key_first wrote: post #135
mike_ivanov wrote: post #85

All GUI apps are different, each being unhappy in its own way. Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. CLI is a common ground, an integration plaza where the peers meet, streams flow and signals are exchanged. No commitment needs to be made to enter this information bazaar. The closest analog in the GUI world is Smalltalk, but again - you need to pledge your allegiance bef…

We have systems for highly interoperable and compostable GUI applications - think NextSTEP or, modern day, dbus, to a lesser extent. Really, GUIs can be formed of a public API with graphics slapped on top. They usually aren't, but they can be.

Many modern web apps are just APIs with a browser GUI.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#137

Post by antonvs »

joshstrange wrote: post #92
fragmede wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lightbulb moment for me was to have it make me a smoke test and to tell to run the test and fix issues (with the code it generated) until it passes. iterate over all features in the Todo.md (that I asked it to make). Claude code will go off and do stuff for I dunno, hours?, while I work on something else.

Hours? Not in my experience. It will do a handful of tasks then say “Great! I’ve finished a block of tasks” and stop. and honestly, you’re gonna want to check its work periodically. You can’t even trust it to run litters and unit test reliably. I’ve lost count of how many times it’s skipped pre-commit checks or committed code with failing tests because it just gives up.

I once had the Gemini CLI get into a loop of failures followed by self-flagellation where it ended saying something like "I'm sorry I have failed you, you should go and find someone capable of helping you."

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#139

Post by wpm »

array_key_first wrote: post #135
mike_ivanov wrote: post #85

All GUI apps are different, each being unhappy in its own way. Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. CLI is a common ground, an integration plaza where the peers meet, streams flow and signals are exchanged. No commitment needs to be made to enter this information bazaar. The closest analog in the GUI world is Smalltalk, but again - you need to pledge your allegiance bef…

We have systems for highly interoperable and compostable GUI applications - think NextSTEP or, modern day, dbus, to a lesser extent. Really, GUIs can be formed of a public API with graphics slapped on top. They usually aren't, but they can be.

I weep for what happened to AppKit/Cocoa

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#140

Post by hboon »

nharada wrote: post #8

I do really like the Unix approach Claude Code takes, because it makes it really easy to create other Unix-like tools and have Claude use them with basically no integration overhead. Just give it the man page for your tool and it'll use it adeptly with no MCP or custom tool definition nonsense. I built a tool that lets Claude use the browser and Claude never has an issue using it.

How does Claude Code use the browser in your script/tool? I've always wanted to control my existing Safari session windows rather than a Chrome or a separate/new Chrome instance.
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