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Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
161–170 of 223 posts
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#162If you like Claude Code or Codex try Warp. It makes both look like a pale shadow of it. And way way cheaper monthly bill.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> like god intended
Meanwhile John Carmack was using an IDE the whole time - Maybe he was just in a different realm.
I tend to agree with the trend of the parents comment. The CLI came along with the horde, like the english language or javascript.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#164All 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…
> Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. Yet highly preferred over CLI applications to the common end user. CLI-only would have stunted the growth of computing.
I'd love something like the Emacs approach. Multi-UI's. Graphical, but with an M-x (or anything else) command line prompt in order to do UI tasks scriptable, from within the application or from the outside.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's extremely handy too! If you try to use web automation tools like selenium or playwright on a website that blocks them, starting chrome browser with the debug port is a great way to get past Cloudflare's "human detector" before kicking off your automation. It's still a pain in the ass but at least it works and it's only once per session
Note that while --remote-debugging-port itself cannot be discovered by cloudflare once you attach a client to it that can be detected as Chrome itself changes it's runtime to accomodate the connection even if you don't issue any automation commands. You need to patch the entire browser to avoid these detection methods and that's why there are so many web scraping/automation SAAS out there with their own browser versi…
Isn't this what SeleniumBase does?
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#166The 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.
Do you automate this process
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#167My mind was blown when claude randomly called adb/logcat on my device connected via usb & running my android app, ingesting the real time log streams to debug the application in real time. Mind boggling moment for me. All because it can call "simple" tools/cli application and use their outputs. This has motivated me to adjust some of my own cli applications & tools to have better input, outputs and documentation, so that claude can figure them out out and call them when needed. It will unlock so many interesting workflows, chaining things together (but in a clever way).
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#168I 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.
It will navigate and know how to fill out forms?
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#169Earlier 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…
It's a bit annoying that you have to tell it to do it, though. Humans (or at least programmers) "build the tools to solve the problem" so intuitively and automatically when the problem starts to "feel hard", that it doesn't often occur to the average programmer that LLMs don't think like this. When you tell an LLM to check the code for errors, the LLM could simply "realize" that the problem is complex enough to warra…
>It's a bit annoying that you have to tell it to do it, though.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Eclipse and IDEA are just different tools for managing text. Yes, they run in GUI windows instead of a tty but that doesn't change their nature, they're not "visual programming".