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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

#81

Post by MisterTea »

GuB-42 wrote: post #69
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #62

You 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 don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. The CLI has been dead for end-users since computers became powerful enough for GUIs, but the CLI has always been there behind the scenes. The closest we have been to the "CLI is dead" mentality was maybe in the late 90s, with pre-OSX MacOS and Windows, but then OSX gave us a proper Unix shell, Windows gave us PowerShell, an…

> I don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead.

Obviously not around during the 90's when the GUI was blowing up thanks to Windows displacing costly commercial Unix machines (Sun, SGI, HP, etc.) By 2000 people were saying Unix was dead and the GUI was the superior interface to a computer. Visual Basic was magic to a lot of people and so many programs were GUI things even if they didn't need to be. Then the web happened and the tables turned.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#82

Post by eikenberry »

jmull wrote: post #54
noahbrier wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do understand about enterprise decision-making. I think it's the pengiun approach to risk management -- they know they need to jump in the water to get where they need to go, but they don't know where the orcas are. So they jostle closer and closer to the edge, some fall in, and the rest see what happens. BTW, I probably shouldn't have only commenting on the small part at the end that annoyed me. I'm fascinated by…

> I think it's the pengiun approach to risk management -- they know they need to jump in the water to get where they need to go, but they don't know where the orcas are. So they jostle closer and closer to the edge, some fall in, and the rest see what happens.

Great way to describe the culture of fear prevalent at large companies.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#84

Post by soperj »

GuB-42 wrote: post #69
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #62

You 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 don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. The CLI has been dead for end-users since computers became powerful enough for GUIs, but the CLI has always been there behind the scenes. The closest we have been to the "CLI is dead" mentality was maybe in the late 90s, with pre-OSX MacOS and Windows, but then OSX gave us a proper Unix shell, Windows gave us PowerShell, an…

> OSX gave us a proper Unix shell

BSD/Mach gave us that, OSX just included it in their operating system.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#85

Post by mike_ivanov »

All GUI apps are different, each being unhappy in its own way. Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. CLI is a common ground, an integration plaza where the peers meet, streams flow and signals are exchanged. No commitment needs to be made to enter this information bazaar. The closest analog in the GUI world is Smalltalk, but again - you need to pledge your allegiance before entering one.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#86

Post by jamie_ca »

maleldil wrote: post #77
simlevesque wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're running linters for formatting etc, just get the agent to run them on autocorrect and it doesn't need to know the status as urgently.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#87

Post by peteybeachsand »

fragmede wrote: post #58
lupusreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The lightbulb moment for me was to have it make me a smoke test and to tell to run the test and fix issues (with the code it generated) until it passes. iterate over all features in the Todo.md (that I asked it to make). Claude code will go off and do stuff for I dunno, hours?, while I work on something else.

genius i gotta try this

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#88

Post by nyrikki »

MisterTea wrote: post #81
GuB-42 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. The CLI has been dead for end-users since computers became powerful enough for GUIs, but the CLI has always been there behind the scenes. The closest we have been to the "CLI is dead" mentality was maybe in the late 90s, with pre-OSX MacOS and Windows, but then OSX gave us a proper Unix shell, Windows gave us PowerShell, an…

> I don't remember any advanced computer user, including developers saying that the CLI is dead. Obviously not around during the 90's when the GUI was blowing up thanks to Windows displacing costly commercial Unix machines (Sun, SGI, HP, etc.) By 2000 people were saying Unix was dead and the GUI was the superior interface to a computer. Visual Basic was magic to a lot of people and so many programs were GUI things ev…

That is a bit of a simplification, many users found value in wysiwyg, there was an aborted low-code visual programming movement.

Microsoft drank early OOP koolaid and thus powershell suffered from problems that were well covered by the time etc…

Ray Norda being pushed out after WordPerfect bought Novell with their own money and leveraged local religious politics in addition to typical corporate politics killed it.

Intel convinced major UNIX companies to drop their CPUs for IA-64 which was never delivered, mainly because the core decision was incompatible with the fundamental limitations of computation etc…

The rise of Linux, VMs and ultimately the cloud all depended on the CLI.

Add in Microsoft anticompetitive behavior plus everything else and you ended up with a dominant GUI os provider with a CLI that most developers found challenging to use.

I worked at some of the larger companies with large windows server installations and everyone of them installed Cygwin to gain access to tools that allowed for maintainable configuration management tools.

There are situations like WordPerfect which had GUI offerings be delayed due to the same problem that still plague big projects today, but by the time the web appeared Microsoft had used both brilliant and extremely unethical practices to gain market dominance.

The rise of technology that helped with graphics like vesa local bus and GPUs in the PC space that finally killed the remaining workstation vendors was actually concurrent with the rise of the web.

Even with that major companies like SGI mainly failed because they dedicated so many resources to low end offerings that they lost their competitiveness on the high end, especially as they fell into Intels trap with Itanium too.

But even that is complicated way beyond what I mentioned above.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#89

Post by derefr »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #79
lupusreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

It's a bit annoying that you have to tell it to do it, though. Humans (or at least programmers) "build the tools to solve the problem" so intuitively and automatically when the problem starts to "feel hard", that it doesn't often occur to the average programmer that LLMs don't think like this.

When you tell an LLM to check the code for errors, the LLM could simply "realize" that the problem is complex enough to warrant building [or finding+configuring] an appropriate tool to solve the problem, and so start doing that... but instead, even for the hardest problems, the LLM will try to brute-force a solution just by "staring at the code really hard."

(To quote a certain cartoon squirrel, "that trick never works!" And to paraphrase the LLM's predictable response, "this time for sure!")

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#90

Post by silisili »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #79
lupusreal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

I've noticed Claude doing this for most tasks without even asking it to. Maybe a recent thing?
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