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Just-bash: Bash for Agents

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61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#61

Post by rbbydotdev »

It’s cool to see this project and others pop up. Virtualizing os primitives like bash and even file systems

You can interface around the nodejs files system interface and have access to some nice tools, like git isomorphic for instance. Then obviously everything couples nicely with agents.

Something I did in my markdown editor project: https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal

Have half a mind to release a browser kit which unifies the file tree explorer and virtual file apis and libs in the browser

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#62

Post by cyanydeez »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #42

The 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 mu…

If you want a better guess: It's because of the man pages for all the tools are likely duplicated across so many media for the LLM training that there's just an efficient pipeline. They go back to the 70s or whatever.

So, mostly re-enforcement along multiple vectors.

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#63

Post by arminsergiony »

Lerc wrote: post #9

I have been playing around with something like this. I'm not going for compatibility, but something that is a bit hackable. Deliberately not having /lib /share and /etc to avoid confusion that it might be posix On neocoties for proof of static hosting https://lerc.neocities.org

[dead]

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#66

Post by fragmede »

resonious wrote: post #59
IceWreck wrote: post #7

At 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.

I'll add that agents (CC/Codex) very often screw up escaping/quoting with their bash scripts and waste tokens figuring out what happened. It's worse when it's a script they save and re use because it's often a code injection vulnerability.

I want them to be better at it, but given how hard it is for me as a human to get it right (which is to say, I get it wrong a lot, especially handling new lines in filenames, or filenames that start with --) I find it hard to fault them too much.

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#67

Post by fragmede »

simonw wrote: post #17
IceWreck wrote: post #7

At 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.

Being unchanged for decades means that the training data should provide great results even for the smaller models.

It means there's also plenty of bad examples in the training data to learn the wrong lessons from though.

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#68

Post by fragmede »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #42

The 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 mu…

I'm not convinced. I don't want to rack servers and diagnose bad RAM like it's still the 90's, so I'm paying someone else for the privilege, especially to get POPs closer to customers than I want to drive or fly to setup, especially in foreign countries where I don't speak the language or know the culture. Fun for vacation but a recipe to waste time and money setting up a local corporate entity and a whole team when I can just pay GCP or AWS and have a server on the other side of the planet from me faster than I can book a plane flight and hotel reservation there.

There's also the maintenance of the server to be considered. Vercel or other PaaS/Lambda/GCP functions/etc serverless means there's just less crap for me to manage, because they're dealing with it, and yeah, they charge money for that service. Being able to tell Claude code, I setup ssh keys and sudo no password for you, go fix my shit; like, that works, but then the hard drive is full so I have to up size the VPS, and if you're stupid/brave, you can give Claude Code MCP access to Chrome so it can click the buttons in Hetzner to upsize for you, but that's time and tokens spent not working on the product so at the end of the day I think Vercel is gonna be fine. AI generating code means there are many many more people trying out making some sort of Internet company, but they'll only discover cheaper options only after paying for Vercel becomes painful.

Re: Just-bash: Bash for Agents

#69

Post by fragmede »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #54
wild_egg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents really do not care at all how "nice" a language is. You only need to be picky with language if a human is going to be working with the code. I get the impression that is not the use case here though

> Agents really do not care at all how "nice" a language is. People do care. > You only need to be picky with language if a human is going to be working with the code. Sooner or later humans will have to work with the code - if only for their own self-preservation. > I get the impression that is not the use case here though If that's not the use case, there's no legitimate use case at all.

> Sooner or later humans will have to work with the code

We want that to be true, but it's starting to look like it might not be.

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