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Tools: Code Is All You Need

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Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#161

Post by mumbisChungo »

65 wrote: post #155
soulofmischief wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the claim for AR, not VR, and you're just noticing how research and development cycles play out, you can draw comparisons to literally any technology cycle.

That is in fact the claim for VR. Remember the Metaverse? Oculus headsets are VR headsets. The Apple Vision Pro is a VR headset.

The metaverse is and was a guess at how the children of today might interact as they age into active market participants. Like all these other examples, speculative mania preceded genuine demand and it remains to be seen whether it plays out over the coming 10-15 years.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#162

Post by e12e »

mritchie712 wrote: post #2

> try completing a GitHub task with the GitHub MCP, then repeat it with the gh CLI tool. You'll almost certainly find the latter uses context far more efficiently and you get to your intended results quicker. This is spot on. I have a "devops" folder with a CLAUDE.md with bash commands for common tasks (e.g. find prod / staging logs with this integration ID). When I complete a novel task (e.g. count all the rows that…

You're letting the LLM execute privileged API calls against your production/test/staging environment, just hoping it won't corrupt something, like truncate logs, files, databases etc?

Or are you asking it to provide example commands that you can sanity check?

I'd be curious to see some more concrete examples.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#163

Post by lotsoweiners »

basch wrote: post #68
dingnuts wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of tech circles it looks like NFTs: people following hype using tech they don't understand which will be popular until the downsides we're aware of that they are ignorant to have consequences, and then the market will reflect the shift in opinion.

No way. Everybody under a certain age is using ChatGPT, where they were once using search and friendship/expertises. It’s the number 1 app in the App Store. Copilot use in the enterprise is so seamless, you just talk to PowerPoint or outlook and it formulated what you were supposed to make or write. It’s not a fad, it is a paradigm change. People don’t need to understand how it works for it to work.

> It’s the number 1 app in the App Store.

When I checked the iOS App Store just now, something called Love Island USA is the #1 free app. Kinda makes you think….

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#164

Post by e12e »

galdre wrote: post #54

My absolute favorite use of MCP so far is Bruce Hauman's clojure-mcp. In short, it gives the LLM (a) a bash tool, (b) a persistent Clojure REPL, and (c) structural editing tools. The effect is that it's far more efficient at editing Clojure code than any purely string-diff-based approach, and if you write a good test suite it can rapidly iterate back and forth just editing files, reloading them, and then re-running t…

https://github.com/bhauman/clojure-mcp

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#165

Post by nativeit »

hollerith wrote: post #116
nativeit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, Unix as a whole is overrated. One reason it won was an agreement mediated by a Federal judge presiding over an anti-trust trial that AT&T would not enter the computer market while IBM would not enter the telecommunications market, so Unix was distributed at zero cost rather than sold. What did Unix win?

Mind share of the basic design. Unix's design decisions are important parts of MacOS and Linux. Multics would be an example of a more innovative OS than Unix, but its influence on the OSes we use today has been a lot less.

I suppose the deeper question I'd have would be, how would its no-cost distribution prevent better alternatives from being developed/promoted/adopted along the way? I guess I don't follow your line of logic. To be fair, I'm not experienced enough with either OS development nor any notable alternatives to Unix to agree/disagree with your conclusions. My intuition wants to disagree, only because I like Linux, and even sort of like Bash scripts--but I have nothing but my own subjective preferences to base that position on, and I'm actually quite open to being better-informed into submission. ;-)

I'm a pretty old hat with Debian at this point, so I've got plenty of opinions for its contemporary implementations, but I always sort of assumed most of the fundamental architectural/systems choices had more or less been settled as the "best choices" via the usual natural selection, along with the OSS community's abiding love for reasoned debate. I can generally understand the issues folks have with some of these defaults, but my favorite aspect of OS's like Debian are that they generally defer to the sysadmin's desires for all things where we're likely to have strong opinions. It's "default position" of providing no default positions. Certainly now that there are containers and orchestration like Nix, the layer that is Unix is even less visible, and infrastructure-as-code mean a lot of developers can just kind of forget about the OS layer altogether, at least beyond the OS('s) they choose for their own daily driver(s).

Getting this back to the OG point--I can understand why people don't like the Bash scripting language. But it seems trivial these days to get to a point where one could use Python, Lua, Forth, et al to automate and control any system running a nix/BSD OS, and nix OS's do several key things rather well (in my opinion), such as service bootstrapping, lifecycle management, networking/comms, and maintaining a small footprint.

For whatever it's worth, one could start with nothing but a Debian ISO and some preseed files, and get to a point where they could orchestrate/launch anything they could imagine using their own language/application of choice, without ever touching having touched a shell prompt or writing a line of Bash. Not for nothing, that's almost certainly how many Linux-based customized distributions (and even full-blown custom/bespoke OS's) are created, but it doesn't have to be so complicated if one just wants to get to where Python scripts are able to run (for example).

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#166

Post by sizzle »

mumbisChungo wrote: post #161
65 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is in fact the claim for VR. Remember the Metaverse? Oculus headsets are VR headsets. The Apple Vision Pro is a VR headset.

The metaverse is and was a guess at how the children of today might interact as they age into active market participants. Like all these other examples, speculative mania preceded genuine demand and it remains to be seen whether it plays out over the coming 10-15 years.

Ahh yes let’s get the next generation addicted to literal screens strapped to their eyeballs for maximum monetization, humanity be damned. Glad it’s a failing bet. Now sex bots might be onto something…

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#167

Post by nativeit »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #112
nativeit wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but bear with me here--it kind of is. I suppose if one wanted to be pedantically literal, then you are indeed correct. In every other meaningful consideration, the parent comment is. Maybe not Bash specifically, but #!/bin/sh is broadly available on nearly every connected device on the planet, in some capacity. From the perspective of how we could automate nearly anything, you'd be hard-pressed to f…

> you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script. 99.9% of my 20-year career has been spent on Windows. So bash scripts are entirely worthless and dead to me.

What do you suppose the proportion is of computers actively running Windows in the world right now, versus those running some kind of *nix/BSD-based OS? This includes everything a person or machine could reasonably interface with, and that's Turing complete (in other words, a traffic light is limited to its own fixed logic, so it doesn't count; but most contemporary wifi routers contain general-purpose memory and processors, many even run some kind of *nix kernel, so they very much do count).

That's my case for Bash being more or less everywhere, but I think this debate is entirely semantic. Literally just talking about different things.

EDIT: escaped *

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#168

Post by mumbisChungo »

sizzle wrote: post #166
mumbisChungo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metaverse is and was a guess at how the children of today might interact as they age into active market participants. Like all these other examples, speculative mania preceded genuine demand and it remains to be seen whether it plays out over the coming 10-15 years.

Ahh yes let’s get the next generation addicted to literal screens strapped to their eyeballs for maximum monetization, humanity be damned. Glad it’s a failing bet. Now sex bots might be onto something…

It may or may not be a failing bet. Maybe smartphones are the ultimate form of human-data interface and we'll simply never do better.

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#169

Post by [deleted] »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #112
nativeit wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but bear with me here--it kind of is. I suppose if one wanted to be pedantically literal, then you are indeed correct. In every other meaningful consideration, the parent comment is. Maybe not Bash specifically, but #!/bin/sh is broadly available on nearly every connected device on the planet, in some capacity. From the perspective of how we could automate nearly anything, you'd be hard-pressed to f…

> you'd be hard-pressed to find something more universal than a shell script. 99.9% of my 20-year career has been spent on Windows. So bash scripts are entirely worthless and dead to me.

[deleted]

Re: Tools: Code Is All You Need

#170

Post by shepherdjerred »

vunderba wrote: post #115
simonw wrote: post #25

Something I've realized about LLM tool use is that it means that if you can reduce a problem to something that can be solved by an LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem. The job then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide and how to define the success criteria for the model. That still takes significant skill an…

> The job then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide, and how to define the success criteria for the model. Your test case seems like a quintessential example where you're missing that last step. Since it is unlikely that you understand the math behind fractals or x86 assembly (apologies if I'm wrong on this), your only means for verifying the a…

Are fractals or x86 assembly representative of most dev work?
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