Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing • Hacker News Board

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#211

Post by raffraffraff » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 8:10 PM UTC

wraptile wrote: post #159

raffraffraff wrote: post #157

Earlier 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…

True, it fails to get past the Cloudflare check if my playwright script is connected to the browser. But since these checks only happen on first visit to the site I'm ok with that.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#212

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:26 AM UTC

libraryofbabel wrote: post #103

derefr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As the other commenter said, these days Claude Code often does actually reach for a script on its own, or for simpler tasks it will do a bash incantation with grep and sed. That is for tasks where a programmatic script solution is a good idea though. I don't think your example of "check the code for errors" really falls in that category - how would you write a script to do that? "Staring at the code really hard" to c…

I've had multiple cases where it will rather write a script to test a thing than actually adding a damn unit test for it :)

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#213

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:40 AM UTC

maleldil wrote: post #64

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…

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.

(I code mostly in Go)

I have a `task build` command that runs linters, tests and builds the project. All the commands have verbosity tuned down to minimum to not waste context on useless crap.

Claude remembers to do it pretty well. I have it in my global CLAUDE.md sot I guess it has more weight? Dunno.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#214

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:41 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #152

simonw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Unix philosophy here is less about it being a terminal app (it's a very rich terminal app, lots of redrawing the whole screen etc) and more about the fact that giving a modern LLM the ability to run shell commands unlocks an incredibly useful array of new capabilities. An LLM can do effectively anything that a human can do by typing commands into a shell now.

And to create Lovecraftian horrors to fix.

With a Lovecraftian iä iä iä -chant you cant git reset Cthulhu back to its dimension.

With LLM Agents you can :D

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#215

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:45 AM UTC

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…

My main problem with GUI tooling is that keyboard use is an afterthought in too many of them

With CLI and TUI tools it's keyboard first and the mouse might work if it wasn't too much of a hassle for the dev.

And another issue with GUI tooling is the lack of composability. With a CLI I can input files to one program grab the output and give it to another and another with ease.

With GUI tools I need to have three of them open at the same time and manually open each one. Or find a single tool that does all three things properly.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#216

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

sarbajitsaha wrote: post #93

How is codex now compared to Claude code? Especially with gpt 5 high for planning and codex for the coding part.

Codex with gpt-5-codex (high) is like an outsourced consultant. You give them the specs and a while later you get the output. It doesn't communicate much during the run (especially the VSCode plugin is really quiet).

Then you check the result and see what happened. It's pretty good at one-shotting things if it gets the gist, but if it goes off the rails you can't go back three steps and redirect.

On the other hand Claude Code is more like pair programming, it's chatting about while doing things, telling you what it's doing and why "out loud". It's easier to interrupt it when you see it going off track, it'll just stop and ask for more instructions (unlike Copilot where if you don't want it to rm the database.file you need to be really fast and skip the operation AND hit the stop button below the chatbox).

I use both regularly, GPT is when I know what to do and have it typed out. Claude is for experimenting and dialogue like "what would be a good idea here?" type of stuff.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#217

Post by tentahedronic » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:46 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #124

Spivak wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Small programs that do a single thing and are easy to comprehend. 2. Those programs integrate with one another to achieve more complex tasks. 3. Text streams are the universal interface and state is represented as text files on disk. Sounds like the UNIX philosophy is a great match for LLMs that use text streams as their interface. It's just so normalized that we don't even "see" it anymore. The fact that all your…

Right, and Claude Code is a large proprietary monolith. There’s nothing particularly UNIXy about it except that it can fork/execve to call ripgrep (or whatever), and that its CLI can use argv or stdin to receive inputs. That’s nowhere enough to make it “UNIX way”.

UNIX is proprietary too, and also a kinda large monolith. UNIX philosophy or UNIX way is just the standard lingo to describe using many single-purpose (usually command line) programs to accomplish your task, there's nothing more to it, so this AI tool definitely is UNIXy in this way. I'm not old enough to even remember if that was how folks even actually used UNIX systems most of the time back in the days, but it doesn't really matter, that's just how we talk these days.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#218

Post by lottin » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 7:48 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #106

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 :(

The Unix philosophy here is less about it being a terminal app (it's a very rich terminal app, lots of redrawing the whole screen etc) and more about the fact that giving a modern LLM the ability to run shell commands unlocks an incredibly useful array of new capabilities. An LLM can do effectively anything that a human can do by typing commands into a shell now.

I can't imagine a situation in which I'd want to explain what I want to do on the command line to an LLM, instead of typing the commands myself.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#219

Post by simonw » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 9:03 PM UTC

lottin wrote: post #218

simonw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Unix philosophy here is less about it being a terminal app (it's a very rich terminal app, lots of redrawing the whole screen etc) and more about the fact that giving a modern LLM the ability to run shell commands unlocks an incredibly useful array of new capabilities. An LLM can do effectively anything that a human can do by typing commands into a shell now.

I can't imagine a situation in which I'd want to explain what I want to do on the command line to an LLM, instead of typing the commands myself.

Use ffmpeg to extract the audio from the first ten seconds of an mp4 file and save it as mp3.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#220

Post by pqs » Sat, Oct 04, 2025, 8:57 AM UTC

SamPatt wrote: post #133

One point to add about integration between LLMs and Obsidian: plugins. Obsidian has a plugin system that can be easily customized. You can run your own JS scripts from a local folder. Claude Code is excellent at creating and modifying them on the fly. For example, I built a custom program that syncs Obsidian files with a publish flag to my Github repo, which triggers a netlify build. My website updates when I update…

I do the same with Emacs and howm-mode. My system has improved a lot since I started using Claude Code. Now I implemented all the features I missed from Evernote!