Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

alephic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 223 posts

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#181

Post by blks »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #20
xorvoid wrote: post #2

Let's do this. But entirely local. Local obsidian, local LLM, and all open source. That's the future I want.

LLMs are making open source programs both more viable and more valuable. I have many programs I use that I wish were a little different, but even if they were open source, it would take a while to acquaint myself with the source code organization to make these changes. LLMs, on the other hand, are pretty good at small self-contained changes like tweaks or new minor features. This makes it easier to modify open source…

So you’re just storing bunch of forks of open source projects with some AI-generated changes applied to them?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#182

Post by Gud »

heavyset_go wrote: post #145
GuB-42 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. The CLI has been dead for end-users since computers became powerful enough for GUIs, but the CLI has always been there behind the scenes. The closest we have been to the "CLI is dead" mentality was maybe in the late 90s, with pre-OSX MacOS and Windows, but then OSX gave us a proper Unix shell, Windows gave us PowerShell, an…

There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where CLIs were considered passe and an emblem of the past. Some developers relied solely on graphical IDEs on GUI-oriented operating systems, and the transition to Linux everywhere broke that trend. Some people didn't take Linux seriously because it was CLI oriented.

I don’t remember that at all.

Maybe in some circles.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#183

Post by jvanderbot »

ACCount37 wrote: post #175
BatteryMountain wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, would you have to build it or would "you" (an AI) have to build it.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#184

Post by jd115 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #145
GuB-42 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. The CLI has been dead for end-users since computers became powerful enough for GUIs, but the CLI has always been there behind the scenes. The closest we have been to the "CLI is dead" mentality was maybe in the late 90s, with pre-OSX MacOS and Windows, but then OSX gave us a proper Unix shell, Windows gave us PowerShell, an…

There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where CLIs were considered passe and an emblem of the past. Some developers relied solely on graphical IDEs on GUI-oriented operating systems, and the transition to Linux everywhere broke that trend. Some people didn't take Linux seriously because it was CLI oriented.

Funny, I've totally missed this.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#185

Post by skydhash »

anthk wrote: post #164
p_ing wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Emacs is smalltalk with characters instead of pixels.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#186

Post by luhsprwhkv2 »

ilteris wrote: post #166
luhsprwhkv2 wrote: post #120

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.

Do you automate this process

No, I just write things in the work journal whenever I feel like it. It’s a mind dump. Then when I’m doing the traditional end of the week review, I’ll analyze it. It’s all very free form.

It works wonders though, like spelunking your raw thoughts.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#187

Post by eddyfromtheblok »

resonious wrote: post #173
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.

Yes, and on top of this, having MCP servers that can reference AWS docs and terraform provider docs has been a godsend

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#188

Post by visarga »

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…

Cursor likes to create one-off scripts, yesterday it filled a folder with 10 of them until it figured out a bug. All the while I was thinking - will it remember to delete the scripts or is it going to spam me like that?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#189

Post by mac-attack »

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...

Definitely searched apt on Debian before I installed the pip pkg. On a somewhat related note, I also thought something broke when `uv tool install mansnip` didn't work.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#190

Post by visarga »

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…

Yeah, I had Cursor refactor a large TypeScript file today and it used a script to do it. I was impressed.
Post reply on HN