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ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

simonwillison.net

281–290 of 336 posts

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#281
post #130
post #5

I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.). Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and m…

> But now that most code is written by LLMs Am I in the Truman show? I don’t think AI has generated even 1% of the code that I run in prod, nor does anyone I respect. Heavily inspired by AI examples, heavily assisted by AI during research sure. Who are these devs that are seeing such great success vibecoding? Vibecoding in prod seems irresponsible at best

For the last 2 or 3 months we made a commitment as a team to go all in on claude code, and have been sharing prompts, skills, etc, and documented all of our projects and at this point, claude is writing a _large_ percentage of our code. Probably upwards of 70 or 80%. It's also been updating our jira tickets and github PRs, which is probably even more useful than writing the code.

Our test coverage has improved dramatically, our documentation has gotten better, our pace of development has gone up. There is also a _big_ difference between the quality of the end product between junior and senior devs on the team.

Junior devs tend to be just like "look at this ticket and write the code."

Senior devs are more like: Okay, can you read the ticket, try to explain to to me in your own words, let's refine the description, can you propose a solution -- ugh that's awful, what if we did this instead.

You would think you would not save a lot of time that way, but even spending an _hour_ trying to direct claude to write the code correctly is less than the 5-6 hours it would take to write it yourself for most issues, with more tests and better documentation when you are finished.

When you first start using claude code, it feels like you are spending more time to get worse work out of it, but once you sort of build up the documentation/skills/tools it needs to be successful, it starts to pay dividends. Last week, I didn't open an IDE _once_ and I committed several thousands lines of code across 2 or 3 different internal projects. A lot of that was a major refactor (smaller files, smaller function sizes, making things more DRY) that I had been putting off for months.

Claude itself made a huge list of suggestions, which I knocked back to about 8 or 10, it opened a tracking issue in jira with small, tractable subtasks, then started knocking out one at a time, each of them being a fairly reviewable PR, with lots of test coverage (the tests had been built out over the previous several months of coding with cursor and claude that sort of mandated them to stop them from breaking functionality), etc.

I had a coworker and chatgpt estimate how long the issue would take if they had to do it without AI. The coworker looked at the code base and said "two weeks". Both claude and chat GPT estimate somewhere in the 6-8 weeks range (which I thought was a wild over estimate, even without AI). Claude code knocked the whole thing out in 8 hours.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.

I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!

  # curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file -
  /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!

# curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file - /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.

ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#284
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

# curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file - /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.

ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.

If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#285

Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.

I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.

I think this is missing the point, These are tools that enable the LLM to do things that humans can do easily.

It stops an LLM from being blocked by the inability to do this thing. Removing this barrier might enable the LLM to complete a task that would be considerable work for a human.

For instance, identifying which files are PNG files containing pictures of birds, regardless of filename, presence or absence of suffix. An image handling LLM can identify if an image is of a bird much more easily than it could determine that an arbitrary file is a png. They can probably still do it, wasting a lot of tokens along the way, but using a few commands to determine which files to even bother looking at as images means the LLM can do what it is good at.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#286
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.

If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?

"Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#287
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?

"Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.

I disagree, in my opinion it's the exact same process, just on a much smaller scale. It's a problem, and we humans are good at solving problems. That is, until LLMs arrived, now we are supposed to become good at prompting, or something.

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#288
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peak LLM will be when we can give some prompt and just get fully compiled binaries of programs to download, no code at all.

Claude code, not too surprisingly, can do that (on a toy example).

toys are for children

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#289
Hmm.. what's this?

> gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only).

Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?

Re: ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

#290
post #289

Hmm.. what's this? > gmail (read-only) # gmail.search_email_ids → any # > Description: Search Gmail message IDs by query/tags (read-only). Chat GPT App on android disavows having this... In what context does chat GPT get (read) access to Gmail? Desktop app?

I got that from the https://chatgpt.com/ web app - I just tried the same prompt in the ChatGPT iPhone app and got the gmail. and gcal. ones too: https://chatgpt.com/share/6978dc20-8a70-8006-9b42-6c0a8080be...

Looks like it's for this feature: https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-5-openai-gmail-calendar

Presumably you have to opt-in to turning this on somewhere.

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