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Just-bash: Bash for Agents
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#42The unix commandline tools being the most efficient way to use an LLM has been a surprise.
I wonder the reason.
Maybe 'do one thing well'? The piping? The fact that the tools have been around so long so there are so many examples in the training data? Simplicity? All of it?
The success of this project depends on the answer.
Even so, I suspect that something like this will be a far too leaky abstraction.
But Vercel must try because they see the writing on the wall.
No one needs expensive cloud platforms anymore.
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been working with the shell long enough that I know just by looking at it. Anyway, it was rethorical. I was making a point about portability. Scripts we write today run even on ancient versions, and it has been an effort kept by lots of different interpreters (not only bash). I'm trying to give sane advice here. Re-implementing bash is a herculean task, and some "small incompatibilities" sometimes reveal themsel…
The project does not list portability as a concern. It's for agent use; they are not trying to re-use existing bash code.
Before, you said:
> they use it because there's a lot of training material.
Now, you say:
> they are not trying to re-use existing bash code.
Can't you see how this is a contradiction?
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I'm sorry, I can't continue like this. I want to have meaningful conversations.
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#44Trying to secure the sandbox the harness is running in seems like the hard way to do things. It's not a bad idea, but I think it'd be easier to focus on isolating the sandbox and securing resources the harness sandbox accesses, since true security requires that anyhow.
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#45Web UI for it: https://justbash.dev
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#46This ends up reading files into node.js and then running a command like grep but implemented in JS. I love the concept but isn’t this incredibly slow compared to native cli tools? Building everything in JS on top of just readFile and writeFile interfaces seems pretty limited in what you can do for performance.
In practice it is actually extremely fast because there is no process fork. You're talking nanoseconds for common commands
[Disclaimer: I made the thing]
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The project does not list portability as a concern. It's for agent use; they are not trying to re-use existing bash code.
Before, you said: > they use it because there's a lot of training material. Now, you say: > they are not trying to re-use existing bash code. Can't you see how this is a contradiction? --- I'm sorry, I can't continue like this. I want to have meaningful conversations.
Is English your second language? "They" refers to very different things here.
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#48https://github.com/vercel-labs/just-bash/blob/main/src/spec-... That's a lot of incompatibilities. LLMs like to use the shell because it's stable and virtually unchanged for decades. It doesn't need to worry much about versions or whether something is supported or not, it can just assume it is. Re-implementing bash is a herculean effort. I wish good luck.
I would not over-read into that doc. In practice, the only missing stuff are extreme edge cases of the type that is actually not consistent between other implementations of bash.
In practice it works great. I haven't seen a failed command in a while
[Disclaimer: I made the thing]
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#49At this point why not make the agents use a restricted subset of python, typescript or lua or something. Bash has been unchanged for decades but its not a very nice language. I know pydantic has been experimenting with https://github.com/pydantic/monty (restricted python) and I think Cloudflare and co were experimenting with giving typescript to agents.
They use bash in ways a human never would, and it seems very intuitive for them.
If you present most LLM's with a run_python tool it won't realize that it can access a standard Linux userspace with it even if it's explicitly detailed. But spiritually the same tool called run_shell it will use correctly.
Gotta work with what's in the training data I suppose.
Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents
#50last weekend I vibe-coded a project called `openfs` that plugs into just-bash https://github.com/jeffchuber/just-bash-openfs it puts a bash interface in front of s3, filesystem (real and in-memory), postgres, and chroma. still very much alpha - but curious what people think about it. see an example app here: https://github.com/jeffchuber/openfs-incident-app
What problem were you trying to solve ? ( not that you need to solve one. I’m just curious )