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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

#31
post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

That's fair. But it's what I believe. I spend a lot of time inside giant companies and there are too many people waiting for stone tablets to come down the mountain with their use cases instead of just playing with this stuff.

I agree, I was very skeptical until I started playing around with these tools and repeatedly got good results with almost no real effort.

Online discussion with randos about this topic is almost useless because everybody is quick to dismiss the other side as hopelessly brainwashed by hype, or burying their heads in the sand for fear of the future of their jobs. I've had much better luck talking about it with people I've known and had mutual respect with before all this stuff came out.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck understanding the biases in a petabyte of text and images and video, or whatever the training set is.

Do you disagree it's important to have access to the data, ease of assessment notwithstanding?

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 controls the process, it's still not you.

Now, running local models instead of using them as a SaaS has a clear purpose: the price of your local model won't suddenly increase ten fold once you start depending on it, like the SaaS models might. Any level of control beyond that is illusory with LLMs.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#33
My experience has been the opposite — a shell prompt is too many degrees of freedom for an LLM, and it consistently misses important information.

I’ve had much better luck with constrained, structure tools that give me control over exactly how the tools behave and what context is visible to the LLM.

It seems to be all about making doing the correct thing easy, the hard things possible, and the wrong things very difficult.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#34
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.

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 ChatGPT a year or so ago and the effort needed to get anything useful out of it greatly exceeded any benifit, so I went into CC with low expectations, but have been blown away.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#36
post #10

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

I disagree actually. Saying things like “everyone else managed to figure it out” is a way of creating FOMO. It might not be the way you want to do it, marketing doesn’t have to be nice (or even right) to work.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a podcast last week where I went into a ton of detail: https://every.to/podcast/how-to-use-claude-code-as-a-thinkin... Basically I have it sitting over the top of my notes and assisting with writing, editing, researching, etc.

Thanks, I’ll take a look. I love obsidian for the same basic reason you do: it’s just a bunch of text files, so I can use terminal tools and write programs to do stuff with them. So far I mostly use LLMs to write the tools themselves, but not actually edit the notes. Maybe I can steal some of your ideas!

I started a repo if you want to play: https://github.com/heyitsnoah/claudesidian

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you disagree it's important to have access to the data, ease of assessment notwithstanding?

It is an interesting question. Of course everyone should have equal access to the data in theory, but I also believe nobody should be forced to offer it for free to others and I don't think I want to spend tax money having the government host and distribute that data. I'm not sure how everyone can have access to the data without necessitating another taking on the burden of providing it.

I think torrent is a very good way to redistribute this type of data. You can even selectively sync and redistribute.

I'm also not saying anyone should be forced to disclose training data. I'm only staying that a LLM that's only openweight and not open data/pipeline barely fits the opensource model of the stack mentioned by OP.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#40
I implore people who are willing and able to send the contents and indices of their private notes repository to cloud based services to rethink their life decisions.

Not around privacy, mind you. If your notes contain nothing that you wouldn’t mind being subpoenaed or read warrantlessly by the DHS/FBI, then you are wasting your one and only life.

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