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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

#191

Post by visarga »

antonvs wrote: post #137
joshstrange wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I saw on X someone posted a screenshot where Gemini got depressed after repeated failure, apologized and actually uninstalled itself. Honorable seppuku.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#192

Post by mac-attack »

hoechst wrote: post #99

Just because a popular new tool runs in the terminal, doesn't make it a shining example for the "Unix philosophy" lol. the comparison makes no sense if you think about it for more than 5 seconds and is hacker news clickbait you and i fell for :(

Please read the article before commenting. It actually references the tenets of Unix and how it is ideal for tool calling

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#193

Post by visarga »

gchamonlive wrote: post #42
tsimionescu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view it as more or less irrelevant. LLMs are fundamentally black boxes. Whether you run the black box locally or use it remotely, whether you train it yourself or use a pretrained version, whether you have access to the training set or not, it's completely irrelevant to control. Using an LLM means giving up control and understanding of the process. Whether it's OpenAI or the training data-guided algorithm that cont…

I on the other hand think it's irrelevant if a technology is a blackbox or not. If it's supposed to fit the opensource/FOSS model of the original post having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights. It's fine for models to have open-weights and closed data. It's only barely fitting the opensource model IMHO though.

> having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights

They probably can't give you the training set as it would amount to publication of infringing content. Where would you store it, and what would you do with it anyway?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#194

Post by phito »

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

From my experience, only a few rare devs do this. Most will stick with (broken/wrong) GUI tools they know made by others, by convenience.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#195

Post by evertedsphere »

joshstrange wrote: post #91
maleldil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Just task that runs linters (ruff and pyright, in my case), formatter, tests and pre-commit hooks, and have Claude run it every time it thinks it's done with a change. It's good enough that when the checks pass, it's usually complete.

This is the best way to approach it but if I had a dollar for each time Claude ran “—no-verify” on the git commits it was doing I’d have 10’s of dollars. Doesn’t matter if you tell it multiple times in CLAUDE.md to not skip checks, it will eventually just skip them so it can commit. It’s infuriating. I hope that as CC evolves there is a better way to tell/force the model to do things like that (linters, formatters, u…

a wrapper script?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#196

Post by phito »

lupusreal wrote: post #72
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #62

You know how people used to say the CLI is dead? Now, due to tools like claude code, CLI is actually clearly the superior interface. (At least for now) It's not supposed to be an us vs them flamewar, of course. But it's fun to see a reversal like this from time to time!

I think it might loop back around pretty quick. I've been using it to write custom GUI interfaces to streamline how I use the computer, I'm working piecemeal towards and entire desktop environment custom made to my own quirky preferences. In the past a big part of the reason I used the terminal so often for basic things was general frustration and discomfort using the mainstream GUI tools, but that's rapidly changing…

Then it'll loop back again to CLI (or even direct system calls...) once human input won't be necessary anymore.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#197

Post by phito »

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.

I would love to do this, but obviously the privacy concerns make it not worth it for me. And no, local LLMs are not an option for now.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#198

Post by fragmede »

tsimionescu wrote: post #67
gchamonlive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I on the other hand think it's irrelevant if a technology is a blackbox or not. If it's supposed to fit the opensource/FOSS model of the original post having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights. It's fine for models to have open-weights and closed data. It's only barely fitting the opensource model IMHO though.

The point of FOSS is control. You want to have access to the source, including build instructions and everything, in order to be able to meaningfully change the program, and understand what it actually does (or pay an expert to do this for you). You also want to make sure that the company that made this doesn't have a monopoly on fixing it for you, so that they can't ask you for exorbitant sums to address an issue yo…

Golden Gate Claude, and abliterated models, plus Deepseek's censoring of Tianamen Square, combined with Grok's alternate political views imply that these boxes are somewhat translucent, especially to leading experts like Ilya Sutskever. In order for Grok to hold alternative views, and to produce NSFW dialog while ChatGPT refuses to implies that there's additional work that happens during training to align models. Getting access to the source used to train the models would let us see into that model's alignment. It's easy enough to ask ChatGPT how to make cocaine, and get a refusal, but what else is lying in wait that hasn't been discovered yet? It's hard to square the notion that these are black boxes that no understands whatsoever, when the original LLama models, which also contain the same refusal, have been edited, at the level of a program, into abliterated models which happily give you a recipe. Note: I am not Pablo Escobar and cannot comment on the veracity of said recipe, only that it no longer refuses.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude

https://huggingface.co/mlabonne/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-a...

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#199

Post by igouy »

skydhash wrote: post #185
anthk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Smalltalk does characters and pixels.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#200

Post by ljm »

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.

This is also a fantastic way for someone to learn the principle of least privilege by setting up a very strict IAM profile for the agent to use without the risk of nuking the system.
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