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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

#171

Post by ACCount37 »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #167

My 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…

I have some repair shop experience, and in my experience, a massive bottleneck in repairing truly complex devices is diagnostics. Often, things are "repaired" by swapping large components until the issue goes away, because diagnosing issues in any more detail is more of an arcane art than something you can teach an average technician to do.

And I can't help but think: what would a cutting edge "CLI ninja" LLM like Claude be able to do if given access to a diagnostic interface that exposes all the logs and sensor readings, a list of known common issues and faults, and a full technical reference manual?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#172

Post by BatteryMountain »

ACCount37 wrote: post #171
BatteryMountain wrote: post #167

My 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…

I have some repair shop experience, and in my experience, a massive bottleneck in repairing truly complex devices is diagnostics. Often, things are "repaired" by swapping large components until the issue goes away, because diagnosing issues in any more detail is more of an arcane art than something you can teach an average technician to do. And I can't help but think: what would a cutting edge "CLI ninja" LLM like Cl…

So try it. Ask claude to call the tool that tails the diagnostics/logs. For some languages, like in android or C#, simply running the application generates a ton of logs, never mind on OS level, which has more low-level stuff. Claude reads through it really well and can find bugs for you. You can tell it what you are looking for, tell it a common/correct set of data or expectations, so it can compare it to what it finds in the logs. It solved an issue for me in 2 minutes that I wasn't able to solve in a couple of months. Basically anything you can run and see output for in the terminal, claude can do the same and analyse it at the same time.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#173

Post by resonious »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #167

My 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…

Similar thing happened to me when it busted out the AWS CLI and figured out a problem with my terraform.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#175

Post by ACCount37 »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #172
ACCount37 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some repair shop experience, and in my experience, a massive bottleneck in repairing truly complex devices is diagnostics. Often, things are "repaired" by swapping large components until the issue goes away, because diagnosing issues in any more detail is more of an arcane art than something you can teach an average technician to do. And I can't help but think: what would a cutting edge "CLI ninja" LLM like Cl…

So try it. Ask claude to call the tool that tails the diagnostics/logs. For some languages, like in android or C#, simply running the application generates a ton of logs, never mind on OS level, which has more low-level stuff. Claude reads through it really well and can find bugs for you. You can tell it what you are looking for, tell it a common/correct set of data or expectations, so it can compare it to what it fi…

For many cases, I'd have to build the tooling first. For many more, the vendor would have to build the tooling into their products first.

Cars have the somewhat standardized OBD ports that you could pry the necessary data out from, but industrial robots or vending machines or smartphones? They sure don't.

But what inspires this line of inquiry is exactly the kind of success I had just feeding random error logs to AI and letting it sift through them for clues. It doesn't always work, but it works just often enough to make me wonder about the broader use cases.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#176

Post by lloeki »

derefr wrote: post #89
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…

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…

> 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.

Hmm. My experience of "the average programmer" doesn't look like yours and looks more like the LLM :/

I'm constantly flabbergasted as to how way too many devs fumble through digging into logs or extracting information or what have you because it simply doesn't occur to them that tools can be composed together.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#177

Post by [deleted] »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #167

My 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…

[deleted]

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#178

Post by mcqueenjordan »

s900mhz wrote: post #123
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this better than calling `cargo clippy` or similar commands yourself?

Claude can then proceed to fix the issues for you

Presumably cargo clippy --fix was the intention. Not all things are fixable, though, which is where LLMs are reasonable for -- the squishy hard-to-autofix things.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#179

Post by lelandfe »

kristopolous wrote: post #150
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.

I updated this thing that searches manpages better recently for the LLM era: https://github.com/day50-dev/Mansnip wrapping this in an STDIO mcp is probably a smart move. I should just api-ify the code and include the server in the pip. How hard could this possibly be...

You know, I have heard some countries are making mansnip illegal these days

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#180

Post by calgoo »

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…

Same here, I have a SQLite db that I have let it look over and extract data. I let it build the scripts then I run them as they would timeout if not and I don't want Claude sitting waiting for 30 min. So I do all the data investigations with Claude as a expert who can traverse the data much faster then me.
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