7 ms·

Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

414 points by noahbrier 1y ago

xorvoid 1y ago
Let's do this. But entirely local. Local obsidian, local LLM, and all open source. That's the future I want.
- smm11 1y ago
  Apple then.
  - p_ing 1y ago
    That rules out the open source part.
- eadmund 1y ago
  Local Org mode, local LLM, all orchestrated with Emacs, all free software. If only I were retired and had infinite time!
- gchamonlive 1y ago
  Open-weights only are also not enough, we need control of the dataset and training pipeline. The average user like me wouldn't be able to run pipelines without serious infrastructure, but it's very important to understand how the data is used and how the models are trained, so that we own the model and can assess its biases openly.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Good luck understanding the biases in a petabyte of text and images and video, or whatever the training set is.
    - gchamonlive 1y ago
      Do you disagree it's important to have access to the data, ease of assessment notwithstanding?
      - scottyah 1y ago
        It is an interesting question. Of course everyone should have equal access to the data in theory, but I also believe nobody should be forced to offer it for free to others and I don't think I want to spend tax money having the government host and distribute that data. I'm not sure how everyone can have access to the data without necessitating another taking on the burden of providing it.
        gchamonlive 1y ago
        I think torrent is a very good way to redistribute this type of data. You can even selectively sync and redistribute. I'm also not saying anyone should be forced to disclose training data. I'm only staying that a LLM that's only openweight and not open data/pipeline barely fits the opensource model of the stack mentioned by OP.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        I view it as more or less irrelevant. LLMs are fundamentally black boxes. Whether you run the black box locally or use it remotely, whether you train it yourself or use a pretrained version, whether you have access to the training set or not, it's completely irrelevant to control. Using an LLM means giving up control and understanding of the process. Whether it's OpenAI or the training data-guided algorithm that controls the process, it's still not you. Now, running local models instead of using them as a SaaS has a clear purpose: the price of your local model won't suddenly increase ten fold once you start depending on it, like the SaaS models might. Any level of control beyond that is illusory with LLMs.
        gchamonlive 1y ago
        I on the other hand think it's irrelevant if a technology is a blackbox or not. If it's supposed to fit the opensource/FOSS model of the original post having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights. It's fine for models to have open-weights and closed data. It's only barely fitting the opensource model IMHO though.
- noahbrier 1y ago
  Seems like this might be possible with opencode? Haven't played much.
- buzzy_hacker 1y ago
  LLMs are making open source programs both more viable and more valuable. I have many programs I use that I wish were a little different, but even if they were open source, it would take a while to acquaint myself with the source code organization to make these changes. LLMs, on the other hand, are pretty good at small self-contained changes like tweaks or new minor features. This makes it easier to modify open source programs, but also means that if a program isn't open source, I can't make these changes at all. Before, I wasn't going to make the change anyway, but now that I actually can, the ability to make changes (i.e. the program is open source) becomes much more important.
  - blks 1y ago
    So you’re just storing bunch of forks of open source projects with some AI-generated changes applied to them?
- nwsm 1y ago
  Is local not infeasible for models of useful size (at least on a typical dev machine with <= 64GB RAM and a single GPU)
- CountGeek 1y ago
  Maybe this is of interest https://laurentcazanove.com/blog/obsidian-rag-api https://laurentcazanove.com/blog/obsidian-rag-api
- BirAdam 1y ago
  LM Studio + aider
xnx 1y ago
No mention/comparison to Gemini CLI? Gemini CLI is awesome and they just added a kind of stealth feature for Chrome automation. This capability was first announced as Project Mariner, and teased for eventual rollout in Chrome, but it's available right now for free in Gemini CLI.
- noahbrier 1y ago
  Tbf I haven't played much with it, but I have generally found that I don't like the permission model on Gemini CLI or Codex anywhere near as much as Claude Code.
- sega_sai 1y ago
  In my experience of trying to do things with gemini cli and claude code, claude code was always significantly smarter. gemini cli makes so many mistakes and then tries hard to fix them (in my applications at least).
nharada 1y ago
I 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.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  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 ChatGPT a year or so ago and the effort needed to get anything useful out of it greatly exceeded any benifit, so I went into CC with low expectations, but have been blown away.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    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.
    - peteybeachsand 1y ago
      genius i gotta try this
    - joshstrange 1y ago
      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.
jmull 1y ago
> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.
- noahbrier 1y ago
  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.
  - Gerardo1 1y ago
    > That's fair. But it's what I believe. That response suggests you aren't interested in discussion or conversation at all. It suggests that your purpose here is to advertise.
    - noahbrier 1y ago
      No, that’s not what it means. You can read what I’ve written about this for the last three years and I’ve been very consistent. In the enterprise too many people are waiting to be told things and whether it’s good for my business or not I’d rather be honest about how I feel (you need to just use this stuff).
      - Gerardo1 1y ago
        >No, that’s not what it means. That's fair but it's what I believe. ...see? Being consistent with stating your beliefs isn't the same as engaging with and about those beliefs. Advertising isn't conversation. Evangelism isn't discussion.
        noahbrier 1y ago
        I'm trying to engage with you on this, but I'm really not sure what you're getting at. You originally stated "I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me." I agree that's the job of marketing, but I'm not someone who markets AI, I'm someone who helps large marketing organizations use it effectively. I agree that if my goal was to market it that wouldn't be an effective message, but my goal is for folks who work in these companies to take some accountability for their own personal development, so that's my message. Again, all I can do is be honest about how I feel and to be consistent in my beliefs and experiences working with these kinds of organizations.
dannyobrien 1y ago
Another everything-is-new-again: https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit is Steve Yegge's drive-emacs-with-LLMs (I saw this mentioned via a video link elsewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJUyVVFOXOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJUyVVFOXOc )
boredumb 1y ago
I've done exactly this with MCP { "name": "unshare_exec", "description": "Run a binary in isolated Linux namespaces using unshare", "inputSchema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "binary": {"type": "string"}, "args": {"type": "array", "items": {"type": "string"}} }, "required": ["binary"], "additionalProperties": false } } It started as unshare and ended up being a bit of a yakshaving endeavor to make things work but i was able to get some surprisingly good results using gemma3 locally and giving it access to run arbitrary debian based utilities.
- all2 1y ago
  Would you be willing to share the sweater? Or the now-naked yak? I'm curious to see what you've come up with. My local LLM experience has been... sub-par in most cases.
frumplestlatz 1y ago
My experience has been the opposite — a shell prompt is too many degrees of freedom for an LLM, and it consistently misses important information. I’ve had much better luck with constrained, structure tools that give me control over exactly how the tools behave and what context is visible to the LLM. It seems to be all about making doing the correct thing easy, the hard things possible, and the wrong things very difficult.
AlexCornila 1y ago
This more like … let’s change the way we code so LLMs and AI coding assist can reduce the error rate and improve reliability
sneak 1y ago
I 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.
- warkdarrior 1y ago
  So your goal in your one and only life is to write notes in your code repo that you don't want subpoenaed?
  - sneak 1y ago
    “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” —Oscar Wilde
blibble 1y ago
LLMs are one large binary that does everything (maybe, if you are lucky today) exact opposite of the unix philosophy
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > LLMs are one large binary that does everything Well, no, they aren't, but the orchestration frameworks in which they are embedded sometimes are (though a lot of times a whole lot of that everything is actually done by separate binaries the framework is made aware of via some configuration or discovery mechanism.)
- disconcision 1y ago
  wait until you find out about human programmers...
  - rhubarbtree 1y ago
    They write the individual tools that do the one specific thing?
  - kfarr 1y ago
    They’re one gigantic organic blob?
- floatrock 1y ago
  sure, but that's not what we're talking about here. the article is framing LLM's as a kind of fuzzy pipe that can automatically connect lots of tools really well. This ability works particularly well with unix-philosophy do-one-thing tools, and so being able to access such tools opens a superpower that is unique and secretly shiny about claudecode that browser-based chatgpt doesn't have.
- btbuildem 1y ago
  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.
tclancy 1y ago
>The filesystem is a great tool to get around the lack of memory and state in LLMs and should be used more often. This feels a bit like rediscovering stateless programming. Obviously the filesystem contents can actually change, but the idea of an idempotent result when running the same AI with the same command(s) and getting the same result would be lovely. Even better if the answer is right.
- lockedinsuburb 1y ago
  If it's consistent one way or the other it would be great: consistently wrong, correct it, consistently right, reward it. It's the unpredictability and inconsistency that's a problem.
imiric 1y ago
There's something deeply hypocritical about a blog that criticizes the "SaaS Industrial Complex"[1], while at the same time praising one of the biggest SaaS in existence, while also promoting their own "AI-first" strategy and marketing company. What even is this? Is it all AI slop? All of these articles are borderline nonsensical, in that weird dreamy tone that all AI slop has. To see this waxing poetic about the Unix philosophy, which couldn't be farther from the modern "AI" workflow, is... something I can't quite articulate, but let's go with "all shades of wrong". Seeing it on the front page of HN is depressing. [1]: https://www.alephic.com/no-saas https://www.alephic.com/no-saas
Kim_Bruning 1y ago
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!
- GuB-42 1y ago
  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, and Linux and its shell came to dominate the server market.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    > 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.
    - nyrikki 1y ago
      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.
itissid 1y ago
A 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 code reviewers life easy? If so how? I think the key issue for me is the time the human takes to *verify*/*maintain* plans is not much less than what it might take them to come up with a plan that is detailed enough that many AI models could easily implement.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  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.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
Yeah 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.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Unix 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.
marstall 1y ago
Agreed - but don't WindSurf, Cursor and Copilot do all the same things now, but with choice of LLM & IDE integration?
mike_ivanov 1y ago
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.
- p_ing 1y ago
  > Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. Yet highly preferred over CLI applications to the common end user. CLI-only would have stunted the growth of computing.
  - anthk 1y ago
    I'd love something like the Emacs approach. Multi-UI's. Graphical, but with an M-x (or anything else) command line prompt in order to do UI tasks scriptable, from within the application or from the outside.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      Emacs is smalltalk with characters instead of pixels.
      - igouy 1y ago
        Smalltalk does characters and pixels.
- array_key_first 1y ago
  We have systems for highly interoperable and compostable GUI applications - think NextSTEP or, modern day, dbus, to a lesser extent. Really, GUIs can be formed of a public API with graphics slapped on top. They usually aren't, but they can be.
sarbajitsaha 1y ago
How is codex now compared to Claude code? Especially with gpt 5 high for planning and codex for the coding part.
- jasonsb 1y ago
  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.
- troupo 1y ago
  I've found it slower than Claude but: - significantly less obsequious (very few "you're absolutely right" that Claude vomits out on every interaction) - less likely to forget and ignore context and AGENTS.md instructions - fewer random changes claiming "now everything is fixed" in the first 30-50% of context - better understanding of usage rules (see link below), one-shotting quite a few things Claude misses Language + framework: Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, Ash, Oban, Reactor SLoC: 22k lines AGENTS.md: some simple instructions, pointing to two MCPs (Tidewave and Stripe), requirement to compile before moving onto next file, usage rules https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html
- simonw 1y ago
  Codex CLI had some huge upgrades in the past few months. Before the GPT-5 release it was a poor imitation IMO - in the macOS terminal it somehow even disabled copy and paste! Codex today is almost unrecognizable in comparison to that version. It's really good. I use both it and Claude Code almost interchangeably at the moment and I'm not really feeling that one is notably better than the other.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    My terminal agent is a Go bubbletea app and it too disables copy/paste and I haven't bothered to figure out why. Of course, I am also not the 5th most visited site on the Internet (more's the pity).
dizhn 1y ago
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.
hoechst 1y ago
Just because a popular new tool runs in the terminal, doesn't make it a shining example for the "Unix philosophy" lol. the comparison makes no sense if you think about it for more than 5 seconds and is hacker news clickbait you and i fell for :(
- Spivak 1y ago
  1. Small programs that do a single thing and are easy to comprehend. 2. Those programs integrate with one another to achieve more complex tasks. 3. Text streams are the universal interface and state is represented as text files on disk. Sounds like the UNIX philosophy is a great match for LLMs that use text streams as their interface. It's just so normalized that we don't even "see" it anymore. The fact that all your tools work on files, are trivially callable by other programs with a single text-based interface of exec(), and output text makes them usable and consumable by an LLM with nothing else needed. This didn't have to be how we built software.
  - drdaeman 1y ago
    Right, and Claude Code is a large proprietary monolith. There’s nothing particularly UNIXy about it except that it can fork/execve to call ripgrep (or whatever), and that its CLI can use argv or stdin to receive inputs. That’s nowhere enough to make it “UNIX way”.
    - pixl97 1y ago
      I mean, you are also a large proprietary monolith. I can't exactly take the run a shell part of your brain and leave the 8 hours of sleep part out. That seemingly is a limitation of intelligence we've not got around yet. The fact that the AI interpreter will use small commands makes it very useful.
      - drdaeman 1y ago
        Uh, my only objection way about talking about Claude Code as “UNIX way/philosophy”. While there are some similarities, they’re nowhere sufficient to call it so. (As far as I’m aware our brains are opposite of UNIX, starting right from the fact they had evolved and were not designed at all. And the article is about Claude and not me.)
BenoitEssiambre 1y ago
A CLI might be the most information theoretically efficient form of API, significantly more succinct than eg. JSON based APIs. It's fitting that it would be optimal for Claude Code given the origin of the name "Claude". Information theoretic efficiency seems to be a theme of UNIX architecture: https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html.
supportengineer 1y ago
It's not clear to me how much of my local data and files will be sent out over the network - so this can't be used in some settings.
ryancnelson 1y ago
This really resonated with me, it's echoing the way i've come to appreciate Claude-code in a terminal for working in/on/with unix-y hosts. A trick I use often with this pattern is (for example): 'you can run shell commands. Use tmux to find my session named "bingo", and view the pane in there. you can also use tmux to send that pane keystrokes. when you run shell commands, please run them in that tmux pane so i can watch. Right now that pane is logged into my cisco router..."
luhsprwhkv2 1y ago
The Claude and Obsidian combo is great. You can offload all the hard parts of managing the workflow to the robots. I've taken to analyzing my daily notes—a stream-of-consciousness mind dump—for new Zettel notes, projects, ideas, and so on. Gemini does just fine, too, though.
- ilteris 1y ago
  Do you automate this process
  - luhsprwhkv2 1y ago
    No, I just write things in the work journal whenever I feel like it. It’s a mind dump. Then when I’m doing the traditional end of the week review, I’ll analyze it. It’s all very free form. It works wonders though, like spelunking your raw thoughts.
- phito 1y ago
  I would love to do this, but obviously the privacy concerns make it not worth it for me. And no, local LLMs are not an option for now.
  - luhsprwhkv2 1y ago
    Yes, that's true. I'm keeping it to work-related mind-dumps only. I definitely self-edit before I do so. I find there's tons of value in doing it, but it's not totally raw thoughts.
SamPatt 1y ago
One point to add about integration between LLMs and Obsidian: plugins. Obsidian has a plugin system that can be easily customized. You can run your own JS scripts from a local folder. Claude Code is excellent at creating and modifying them on the fly. For example, I built a custom program that syncs Obsidian files with a publish flag to my Github repo, which triggers a netlify build. My website updates when I update my vault and run a sync.
- pqs 1y ago
  I do the same with Emacs and howm-mode. My system has improved a lot since I started using Claude Code. Now I implemented all the features I missed from Evernote!
paraknight 1y ago
The author may like https://omnara.com/ https://omnara.com/ (no affiliation) instead of SSH-ing from their phone. I have a similar setup with Obsidian and a permanently-on headless Claude Code for my PKM that I can access through the phone app.
queenss90 1y ago
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richwisdomwise 1y ago
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- ohmahjong 1y ago
  Spam
vance1996 1y ago
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globular-toast 1y ago
Yep. If you're already familiar with Unix, Claude Code doesn't even seem that amazing. The idea of composing simple things together into data pipelines is incredibly powerful. It seems every generation rediscovers this. Kleppmann wrote about it in his book. ESR has a whole book about it.
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sakoht 1y ago
If you like Claude Code or Codex try Warp. It makes both look like a pale shadow of it. And way way cheaper monthly bill.
BatteryMountain 1y ago
My mind was blown when claude randomly called adb/logcat on my device connected via usb & running my android app, ingesting the real time log streams to debug the application in real time. Mind boggling moment for me. All because it can call "simple" tools/cli application and use their outputs. This has motivated me to adjust some of my own cli applications & tools to have better input, outputs and documentation, so that claude can figure them out out and call them when needed. It will unlock so many interesting workflows, chaining things together (but in a clever way).
- ACCount37 1y ago
  I have some repair shop experience, and in my experience, a massive bottleneck in repairing truly complex devices is diagnostics. Often, things are "repaired" by swapping large components until the issue goes away, because diagnosing issues in any more detail is more of an arcane art than something you can teach an average technician to do. And I can't help but think: what would a cutting edge "CLI ninja" LLM like Claude be able to do if given access to a diagnostic interface that exposes all the logs and sensor readings, a list of known common issues and faults, and a full technical reference manual?
  - BatteryMountain 1y ago
    So try it. Ask claude to call the tool that tails the diagnostics/logs. For some languages, like in android or C#, simply running the application generates a ton of logs, never mind on OS level, which has more low-level stuff. Claude reads through it really well and can find bugs for you. You can tell it what you are looking for, tell it a common/correct set of data or expectations, so it can compare it to what it finds in the logs. It solved an issue for me in 2 minutes that I wasn't able to solve in a couple of months. Basically anything you can run and see output for in the terminal, claude can do the same and analyse it at the same time.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      For many cases, I'd have to build the tooling first. For many more, the vendor would have to build the tooling into their products first. Cars have the somewhat standardized OBD ports that you could pry the necessary data out from, but industrial robots or vending machines or smartphones? They sure don't. But what inspires this line of inquiry is exactly the kind of success I had just feeding random error logs to AI and letting it sift through them for clues. It doesn't always work, but it works just often enough to make me wonder about the broader use cases.
user3939382 1y ago
I keep reading these top voted posts about things I was onto several months ago.
assimpleaspossi 1y ago
Of note: Occasionally I ask a FreeBSD question. Claude (and I think others) insist on using Bash even though I've told it for quite a long time now that FreeBSD does not natively use or install Bash. For which is humbly apologizes but will continue to do so on the next question.
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  That's how describe AI code agents to non-coders. If you ask it what 2 + 2 is, it will say "5". And if you tell it that's wrong and ask it to do it again, it will say, "You're right! My last answer was incorrect. The correct answer is 2 + 2 is 5."

414 points by noahbrier 1y ago

xorvoid 1y ago

Let's do this. But entirely local. Local obsidian, local LLM, and all open source. That's the future I want.

smm11 1y ago
Apple then.
- p_ing 1y ago
  That rules out the open source part.
eadmund 1y ago
Local Org mode, local LLM, all orchestrated with Emacs, all free software. If only I were retired and had infinite time!
gchamonlive 1y ago
Open-weights only are also not enough, we need control of the dataset and training pipeline. The average user like me wouldn't be able to run pipelines without serious infrastructure, but it's very important to understand how the data is used and how the models are trained, so that we own the model and can assess its biases openly.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Good luck understanding the biases in a petabyte of text and images and video, or whatever the training set is.
  - gchamonlive 1y ago
    Do you disagree it's important to have access to the data, ease of assessment notwithstanding?
    - scottyah 1y ago
      It is an interesting question. Of course everyone should have equal access to the data in theory, but I also believe nobody should be forced to offer it for free to others and I don't think I want to spend tax money having the government host and distribute that data. I'm not sure how everyone can have access to the data without necessitating another taking on the burden of providing it.
      - gchamonlive 1y ago
        I think torrent is a very good way to redistribute this type of data. You can even selectively sync and redistribute. I'm also not saying anyone should be forced to disclose training data. I'm only staying that a LLM that's only openweight and not open data/pipeline barely fits the opensource model of the stack mentioned by OP.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      I view it as more or less irrelevant. LLMs are fundamentally black boxes. Whether you run the black box locally or use it remotely, whether you train it yourself or use a pretrained version, whether you have access to the training set or not, it's completely irrelevant to control. Using an LLM means giving up control and understanding of the process. Whether it's OpenAI or the training data-guided algorithm that controls the process, it's still not you. Now, running local models instead of using them as a SaaS has a clear purpose: the price of your local model won't suddenly increase ten fold once you start depending on it, like the SaaS models might. Any level of control beyond that is illusory with LLMs.
      - gchamonlive 1y ago
        I on the other hand think it's irrelevant if a technology is a blackbox or not. If it's supposed to fit the opensource/FOSS model of the original post having access to precursors is just as important as having access to the weights. It's fine for models to have open-weights and closed data. It's only barely fitting the opensource model IMHO though.
noahbrier 1y ago
Seems like this might be possible with opencode? Haven't played much.
buzzy_hacker 1y ago
LLMs are making open source programs both more viable and more valuable. I have many programs I use that I wish were a little different, but even if they were open source, it would take a while to acquaint myself with the source code organization to make these changes. LLMs, on the other hand, are pretty good at small self-contained changes like tweaks or new minor features. This makes it easier to modify open source programs, but also means that if a program isn't open source, I can't make these changes at all. Before, I wasn't going to make the change anyway, but now that I actually can, the ability to make changes (i.e. the program is open source) becomes much more important.
- blks 1y ago
  So you’re just storing bunch of forks of open source projects with some AI-generated changes applied to them?
nwsm 1y ago
Is local not infeasible for models of useful size (at least on a typical dev machine with <= 64GB RAM and a single GPU)
CountGeek 1y ago
Maybe this is of interest https://laurentcazanove.com/blog/obsidian-rag-api https://laurentcazanove.com/blog/obsidian-rag-api
BirAdam 1y ago
LM Studio + aider

xnx 1y ago

No mention/comparison to Gemini CLI? Gemini CLI is awesome and they just added a kind of stealth feature for Chrome automation. This capability was first announced as Project Mariner, and teased for eventual rollout in Chrome, but it's available right now for free in Gemini CLI.

noahbrier 1y ago
Tbf I haven't played much with it, but I have generally found that I don't like the permission model on Gemini CLI or Codex anywhere near as much as Claude Code.
sega_sai 1y ago
In my experience of trying to do things with gemini cli and claude code, claude code was always significantly smarter. gemini cli makes so many mistakes and then tries hard to fix them (in my applications at least).

nharada 1y ago

I 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.

lupusreal 1y ago
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 ChatGPT a year or so ago and the effort needed to get anything useful out of it greatly exceeded any benifit, so I went into CC with low expectations, but have been blown away.
- fragmede 1y ago
  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.
  - peteybeachsand 1y ago
    genius i gotta try this
  - joshstrange 1y ago
    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.

jmull 1y ago

> Anyone who can't find use cases for LLMs isn't trying hard enough That's an interesting viewpoint from an AI marketing company. I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me.

noahbrier 1y ago
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.
- Gerardo1 1y ago
  > That's fair. But it's what I believe. That response suggests you aren't interested in discussion or conversation at all. It suggests that your purpose here is to advertise.
  - noahbrier 1y ago
    No, that’s not what it means. You can read what I’ve written about this for the last three years and I’ve been very consistent. In the enterprise too many people are waiting to be told things and whether it’s good for my business or not I’d rather be honest about how I feel (you need to just use this stuff).
    - Gerardo1 1y ago
      >No, that’s not what it means. That's fair but it's what I believe. ...see? Being consistent with stating your beliefs isn't the same as engaging with and about those beliefs. Advertising isn't conversation. Evangelism isn't discussion.
      - noahbrier 1y ago
        I'm trying to engage with you on this, but I'm really not sure what you're getting at. You originally stated "I think the essential job of marketing is to help people make the connection between their problems and your solutions. Putting all on them in a kind of blamey way doesn't seem like a great approach to me." I agree that's the job of marketing, but I'm not someone who markets AI, I'm someone who helps large marketing organizations use it effectively. I agree that if my goal was to market it that wouldn't be an effective message, but my goal is for folks who work in these companies to take some accountability for their own personal development, so that's my message. Again, all I can do is be honest about how I feel and to be consistent in my beliefs and experiences working with these kinds of organizations.

dannyobrien 1y ago

Another everything-is-new-again: https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit is Steve Yegge's drive-emacs-with-LLMs (I saw this mentioned via a video link elsewhere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJUyVVFOXOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJUyVVFOXOc )

boredumb 1y ago

I've done exactly this with MCP { "name": "unshare_exec", "description": "Run a binary in isolated Linux namespaces using unshare", "inputSchema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "binary": {"type": "string"}, "args": {"type": "array", "items": {"type": "string"}} }, "required": ["binary"], "additionalProperties": false } } It started as unshare and ended up being a bit of a yakshaving endeavor to make things work but i was able to get some surprisingly good results using gemma3 locally and giving it access to run arbitrary debian based utilities.

all2 1y ago
Would you be willing to share the sweater? Or the now-naked yak? I'm curious to see what you've come up with. My local LLM experience has been... sub-par in most cases.

frumplestlatz 1y ago

My experience has been the opposite — a shell prompt is too many degrees of freedom for an LLM, and it consistently misses important information. I’ve had much better luck with constrained, structure tools that give me control over exactly how the tools behave and what context is visible to the LLM. It seems to be all about making doing the correct thing easy, the hard things possible, and the wrong things very difficult.

AlexCornila 1y ago

This more like … let’s change the way we code so LLMs and AI coding assist can reduce the error rate and improve reliability

sneak 1y ago

I 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.

warkdarrior 1y ago
So your goal in your one and only life is to write notes in your code repo that you don't want subpoenaed?
- sneak 1y ago
  “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” —Oscar Wilde

blibble 1y ago

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

dragonwriter 1y ago
> LLMs are one large binary that does everything Well, no, they aren't, but the orchestration frameworks in which they are embedded sometimes are (though a lot of times a whole lot of that everything is actually done by separate binaries the framework is made aware of via some configuration or discovery mechanism.)
disconcision 1y ago
wait until you find out about human programmers...
- rhubarbtree 1y ago
  They write the individual tools that do the one specific thing?
- kfarr 1y ago
  They’re one gigantic organic blob?
floatrock 1y ago
sure, but that's not what we're talking about here. the article is framing LLM's as a kind of fuzzy pipe that can automatically connect lots of tools really well. This ability works particularly well with unix-philosophy do-one-thing tools, and so being able to access such tools opens a superpower that is unique and secretly shiny about claudecode that browser-based chatgpt doesn't have.
btbuildem 1y ago
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.

tclancy 1y ago

>The filesystem is a great tool to get around the lack of memory and state in LLMs and should be used more often. This feels a bit like rediscovering stateless programming. Obviously the filesystem contents can actually change, but the idea of an idempotent result when running the same AI with the same command(s) and getting the same result would be lovely. Even better if the answer is right.

lockedinsuburb 1y ago
If it's consistent one way or the other it would be great: consistently wrong, correct it, consistently right, reward it. It's the unpredictability and inconsistency that's a problem.

imiric 1y ago

There's something deeply hypocritical about a blog that criticizes the "SaaS Industrial Complex"[1], while at the same time praising one of the biggest SaaS in existence, while also promoting their own "AI-first" strategy and marketing company. What even is this? Is it all AI slop? All of these articles are borderline nonsensical, in that weird dreamy tone that all AI slop has. To see this waxing poetic about the Unix philosophy, which couldn't be farther from the modern "AI" workflow, is... something I can't quite articulate, but let's go with "all shades of wrong". Seeing it on the front page of HN is depressing. [1]: https://www.alephic.com/no-saas https://www.alephic.com/no-saas

Kim_Bruning 1y ago

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!

GuB-42 1y ago
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, and Linux and its shell came to dominate the server market.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  > 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.
  - nyrikki 1y ago
    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.

itissid 1y ago

A 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 code reviewers life easy? If so how? I think the key issue for me is the time the human takes to *verify*/*maintain* plans is not much less than what it might take them to come up with a plan that is detailed enough that many AI models could easily implement.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
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.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

Yeah 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.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Unix 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.

marstall 1y ago

Agreed - but don't WindSurf, Cursor and Copilot do all the same things now, but with choice of LLM & IDE integration?

mike_ivanov 1y ago

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.

p_ing 1y ago
> Moated fiefdoms they are, scattered within the boundaries of their operating system. Yet highly preferred over CLI applications to the common end user. CLI-only would have stunted the growth of computing.
- anthk 1y ago
  I'd love something like the Emacs approach. Multi-UI's. Graphical, but with an M-x (or anything else) command line prompt in order to do UI tasks scriptable, from within the application or from the outside.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Emacs is smalltalk with characters instead of pixels.
    - igouy 1y ago
      Smalltalk does characters and pixels.
array_key_first 1y ago
We have systems for highly interoperable and compostable GUI applications - think NextSTEP or, modern day, dbus, to a lesser extent. Really, GUIs can be formed of a public API with graphics slapped on top. They usually aren't, but they can be.

sarbajitsaha 1y ago

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

jasonsb 1y ago
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.
troupo 1y ago
I've found it slower than Claude but: - significantly less obsequious (very few "you're absolutely right" that Claude vomits out on every interaction) - less likely to forget and ignore context and AGENTS.md instructions - fewer random changes claiming "now everything is fixed" in the first 30-50% of context - better understanding of usage rules (see link below), one-shotting quite a few things Claude misses Language + framework: Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, Ash, Oban, Reactor SLoC: 22k lines AGENTS.md: some simple instructions, pointing to two MCPs (Tidewave and Stripe), requirement to compile before moving onto next file, usage rules https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html
simonw 1y ago
Codex CLI had some huge upgrades in the past few months. Before the GPT-5 release it was a poor imitation IMO - in the macOS terminal it somehow even disabled copy and paste! Codex today is almost unrecognizable in comparison to that version. It's really good. I use both it and Claude Code almost interchangeably at the moment and I'm not really feeling that one is notably better than the other.
- tptacek 1y ago
  My terminal agent is a Go bubbletea app and it too disables copy/paste and I haven't bothered to figure out why. Of course, I am also not the 5th most visited site on the Internet (more's the pity).

dizhn 1y ago

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.

hoechst 1y ago

Just because a popular new tool runs in the terminal, doesn't make it a shining example for the "Unix philosophy" lol. the comparison makes no sense if you think about it for more than 5 seconds and is hacker news clickbait you and i fell for :(

Spivak 1y ago
1. Small programs that do a single thing and are easy to comprehend. 2. Those programs integrate with one another to achieve more complex tasks. 3. Text streams are the universal interface and state is represented as text files on disk. Sounds like the UNIX philosophy is a great match for LLMs that use text streams as their interface. It's just so normalized that we don't even "see" it anymore. The fact that all your tools work on files, are trivially callable by other programs with a single text-based interface of exec(), and output text makes them usable and consumable by an LLM with nothing else needed. This didn't have to be how we built software.
- drdaeman 1y ago
  Right, and Claude Code is a large proprietary monolith. There’s nothing particularly UNIXy about it except that it can fork/execve to call ripgrep (or whatever), and that its CLI can use argv or stdin to receive inputs. That’s nowhere enough to make it “UNIX way”.
  - pixl97 1y ago
    I mean, you are also a large proprietary monolith. I can't exactly take the run a shell part of your brain and leave the 8 hours of sleep part out. That seemingly is a limitation of intelligence we've not got around yet. The fact that the AI interpreter will use small commands makes it very useful.
    - drdaeman 1y ago
      Uh, my only objection way about talking about Claude Code as “UNIX way/philosophy”. While there are some similarities, they’re nowhere sufficient to call it so. (As far as I’m aware our brains are opposite of UNIX, starting right from the fact they had evolved and were not designed at all. And the article is about Claude and not me.)

BenoitEssiambre 1y ago

A CLI might be the most information theoretically efficient form of API, significantly more succinct than eg. JSON based APIs. It's fitting that it would be optimal for Claude Code given the origin of the name "Claude". Information theoretic efficiency seems to be a theme of UNIX architecture: https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html.

supportengineer 1y ago

It's not clear to me how much of my local data and files will be sent out over the network - so this can't be used in some settings.

ryancnelson 1y ago

This really resonated with me, it's echoing the way i've come to appreciate Claude-code in a terminal for working in/on/with unix-y hosts. A trick I use often with this pattern is (for example): 'you can run shell commands. Use tmux to find my session named "bingo", and view the pane in there. you can also use tmux to send that pane keystrokes. when you run shell commands, please run them in that tmux pane so i can watch. Right now that pane is logged into my cisco router..."

luhsprwhkv2 1y ago

The Claude and Obsidian combo is great. You can offload all the hard parts of managing the workflow to the robots. I've taken to analyzing my daily notes—a stream-of-consciousness mind dump—for new Zettel notes, projects, ideas, and so on. Gemini does just fine, too, though.

ilteris 1y ago
Do you automate this process
- luhsprwhkv2 1y ago
  No, I just write things in the work journal whenever I feel like it. It’s a mind dump. Then when I’m doing the traditional end of the week review, I’ll analyze it. It’s all very free form. It works wonders though, like spelunking your raw thoughts.
phito 1y ago
I would love to do this, but obviously the privacy concerns make it not worth it for me. And no, local LLMs are not an option for now.
- luhsprwhkv2 1y ago
  Yes, that's true. I'm keeping it to work-related mind-dumps only. I definitely self-edit before I do so. I find there's tons of value in doing it, but it's not totally raw thoughts.

SamPatt 1y ago

One point to add about integration between LLMs and Obsidian: plugins. Obsidian has a plugin system that can be easily customized. You can run your own JS scripts from a local folder. Claude Code is excellent at creating and modifying them on the fly. For example, I built a custom program that syncs Obsidian files with a publish flag to my Github repo, which triggers a netlify build. My website updates when I update my vault and run a sync.

pqs 1y ago
I do the same with Emacs and howm-mode. My system has improved a lot since I started using Claude Code. Now I implemented all the features I missed from Evernote!

paraknight 1y ago

The author may like https://omnara.com/ https://omnara.com/ (no affiliation) instead of SSH-ing from their phone. I have a similar setup with Obsidian and a permanently-on headless Claude Code for my PKM that I can access through the phone app.

queenss90 1y ago

[flagged]

richwisdomwise 1y ago

[flagged]

ohmahjong 1y ago
Spam

vance1996 1y ago

[dead]

globular-toast 1y ago

Yep. If you're already familiar with Unix, Claude Code doesn't even seem that amazing. The idea of composing simple things together into data pipelines is incredibly powerful. It seems every generation rediscovers this. Kleppmann wrote about it in his book. ESR has a whole book about it.

deleted 1y ago

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sakoht 1y ago

If you like Claude Code or Codex try Warp. It makes both look like a pale shadow of it. And way way cheaper monthly bill.

BatteryMountain 1y ago

My mind was blown when claude randomly called adb/logcat on my device connected via usb & running my android app, ingesting the real time log streams to debug the application in real time. Mind boggling moment for me. All because it can call "simple" tools/cli application and use their outputs. This has motivated me to adjust some of my own cli applications & tools to have better input, outputs and documentation, so that claude can figure them out out and call them when needed. It will unlock so many interesting workflows, chaining things together (but in a clever way).

ACCount37 1y ago
I have some repair shop experience, and in my experience, a massive bottleneck in repairing truly complex devices is diagnostics. Often, things are "repaired" by swapping large components until the issue goes away, because diagnosing issues in any more detail is more of an arcane art than something you can teach an average technician to do. And I can't help but think: what would a cutting edge "CLI ninja" LLM like Claude be able to do if given access to a diagnostic interface that exposes all the logs and sensor readings, a list of known common issues and faults, and a full technical reference manual?
- BatteryMountain 1y ago
  So try it. Ask claude to call the tool that tails the diagnostics/logs. For some languages, like in android or C#, simply running the application generates a ton of logs, never mind on OS level, which has more low-level stuff. Claude reads through it really well and can find bugs for you. You can tell it what you are looking for, tell it a common/correct set of data or expectations, so it can compare it to what it finds in the logs. It solved an issue for me in 2 minutes that I wasn't able to solve in a couple of months. Basically anything you can run and see output for in the terminal, claude can do the same and analyse it at the same time.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    For many cases, I'd have to build the tooling first. For many more, the vendor would have to build the tooling into their products first. Cars have the somewhat standardized OBD ports that you could pry the necessary data out from, but industrial robots or vending machines or smartphones? They sure don't. But what inspires this line of inquiry is exactly the kind of success I had just feeding random error logs to AI and letting it sift through them for clues. It doesn't always work, but it works just often enough to make me wonder about the broader use cases.

user3939382 1y ago

I keep reading these top voted posts about things I was onto several months ago.

assimpleaspossi 1y ago

Of note: Occasionally I ask a FreeBSD question. Claude (and I think others) insist on using Bash even though I've told it for quite a long time now that FreeBSD does not natively use or install Bash. For which is humbly apologizes but will continue to do so on the next question.

thinkingtoilet 1y ago
That's how describe AI code agents to non-coders. If you ask it what 2 + 2 is, it will say "5". And if you tell it that's wrong and ask it to do it again, it will say, "You're right! My last answer was incorrect. The correct answer is 2 + 2 is 5."