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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

#91

Post by joshstrange »

maleldil wrote: post #64
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…

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.

This is the best way to approach it but if I had a dollar for each time Claude ran “—no-verify” on the git commits it was doing I’d have 10’s of dollars.

Doesn’t matter if you tell it multiple times in CLAUDE.md to not skip checks, it will eventually just skip them so it can commit. It’s infuriating.

I hope that as CC evolves there is a better way to tell/force the model to do things like that (linters, formatters, unit/e2e tests, etc).

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#92

Post by joshstrange »

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.

Hours? Not in my experience. It will do a handful of tasks then say “Great! I’ve finished a block of tasks” and stop. and honestly, you’re gonna want to check its work periodically. You can’t even trust it to run litters and unit test reliably. I’ve lost count of how many times it’s skipped pre-commit checks or committed code with failing tests because it just gives up.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#94

Post by kfarr »

disconcision wrote: post #55
blibble wrote: post #50

LLMs are one large binary that does everything (maybe, if you are lucky today) exact opposite of the unix philosophy

wait until you find out about human programmers...

They’re one gigantic organic blob?

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#96

Post by maleldil »

jamie_ca wrote: post #86
maleldil wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just one part of it. I want the LLM to see type checking errors, failing test outputs, etc.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#97

Post by dizhn »

This says Claude Code but seems like it would apply to Gemini CLI (and its clones like iflow, qwen), opencode, aider etc too as well as work with any decent model out there. I haven't used claude code but these CLIs and models (deepseek, qwen, kimi, gemini, glm, even grok) are quite capable.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#98

Post by alecco »

silisili wrote: post #90
libraryofbabel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. But not always. It's better if you add a line somewhere reminding it.

Re: Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

#100

Post by jasonsb »

sarbajitsaha wrote: post #93

How is codex now compared to Claude code? Especially with gpt 5 high for planning and codex for the coding part.

I wouldn’t say it’s particularly good, at least not based on my limited experience. While some people argue it’s significantly better, I’ve found it to be noticeably slower than Claude, often taking two to three times longer to complete the same tasks. That said, I’m open to giving it another try when I have more time; right now my schedule is too tight to accommodate its slower pace.
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