Let's do this. But entirely local. Local obsidian, local LLM, and all open source. That's the future I want.
Maybe this is of interest https://laurentcazanove.com/blog/obsidian-rag-api
Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
71–80 of 223 posts
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#72You 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 for me.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#73I 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.
So your goal in your one and only life is to write notes in your code repo that you don't want subpoenaed?
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#74LLMs are one large binary that does everything (maybe, if you are lucky today) exact opposite of the unix philosophy
It's more like a fluid/shapeless orchestrator that fuzzily interfaces between human and machine language, arising momentarily from a vat to take the exact form that fits the desired function, then disintegrates until called upon again.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#75A few days ago I read an article from humnanlayer. They mentioned shipping a weeks worth of collaborative work in less than a day. That was one data point on a project. - Has anyone found claude code been able to documentation for parts of the code which does not: (a). Explode in maintenance time exponentially to help claude understand and iterate without falling over/hallucinating/design poorly? (b). Use it to make…
It is pretty tiresome with the hype tweets and not being able to judge the vibe code cruft and demoware factor.
Especially on bootstrap/setup, AIs are fantastic for cutting out massive amounts of time, which is a huge boon for our profession. But core logic? I think that's where the not-really-saving-time studies are coming from.
I'm surprised there aren't faux academic B-school productivity studies coming out to counter that (sponsored by AI funding of course) already, but then again I don't read B-school journals.
I actually wonder if the halflife decay of the critical mass of vibecode will almost perfectly coincide with the crash/vroosh of labor leaving the profession to clean it up. It might be a mini-y2k event, without such a dramatic single day.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#76Yeah absolutely, being so close to the filesystem gets Claude Code the closest experience I've had with an agent that can actually get things done. Really all the years of UIs we've created for each other just get in the way of these systems, and on a broader scale it will probably be more important than ever to have a reasonable API in your apps.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A tip for everyone doing this: pipe the linters' stdout to /dev/null to save on tokens.
Why? The agent needs the error messages from the linters to know what to do.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my point. Those tools are great specifically because of the simplicity of how they expose their functionality.
and yet the tools are still difficult to use. I could Read The Fine Manual, web search, stackoverflow, post a question on a Bulletin Board, or ask the Generative Artificial Inference robot. A lot of this seems like our user interface preferences. For example, my preference is that I just intuitively know that -i followed by a filepath is the input file but why can't I just drag the video icon onto ffmpeg? What might…
What you’re asking is the equivalent of “Why can’t I just press a button and have a plane takeoff, fly, and land by itself”. You can have a plane that does that, but only in a limited context. To program the whole decision tree for all cases is not economical (or feasible?).
ffmpeg does all things media conversion. If you don’t want to learn how to use it, you find someone that does (or do the LLM gamble) or try to find a wrapper that have a simpler interface and hope the limited feature set encompasses your use cases.
A cli tool can be extremely versatile. GUI is full of accidental complexities, so unless your selling point is intuitiveness, it’s just extra work.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#79I 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 C…
As an extension of this idea: for some tasks, rather than asking Claude Code to do a thing, you can often get better results from asking Claude Code to write and run a script to do the thing.
Example: read this log file and extract XYZ from it and show me a table of the results. Instead of having the agent read in the whole log file into the context and try to process it with raw LLM attention, you can get it to read in a sample and then write a script to process the whole thing. This works particularly well when you want to do something with math, like compute a mean or a median. LLMs are bad at doing math on their own, and good at writing scripts to do math for them.
A lot of interesting techniques become possible when you have an agent that can write quick scripts or CLI tools for you, on the fly, and run them as well.
Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing
#80Unix tools let agents act & observe in many versatile ways. That lets them close their loops. Taking yourself out of the loop lets your agent work far more efficiently.
But anything you can do on the CLI, so can an agent. It’s the same thing as chefs preferring to work with sharp knives.