5 ms·
Windows has never felt more archaic than now. I can't imagine trying to do work on a Windows machine in the age of LLMs. If there is anything that LLMs are roc
by cheeze 17d ago
Windows has never felt more archaic than now. I can't imagine trying to do work on a Windows machine in the age of LLMs.
If there is anything that LLMs are rock solid at these days, it's unix terminal usage.
- bonesss 16d agoHow do you work on Windows in the age of LLMs? That’s easy: you activate WSL and then ask the LLM how to get networking and stuff working since they changed it with WSL2. You need a config file flag to setup network mirroring now.
- luma 16d agoThey're also great at powershell, you just need to tell it to do so. sh is neat but it's 55 years old, there are newer and better shell environment concepts out there and the robots can handle them well too, try it some time!
- isityettime 16d agoPowerShell unfortunately just isn't that first-class, even on Windows. You'll inevitably discover, if you do this, that certain things simply can't be automated via PowerShell, that some PowerShell modules wrap or lag behind older Windows CLI tools, that various things you want to do still require manual registry hacks, etc. Try starting from a blank slate Windows machine and making a commitment to only changing settings via PowerShell, and ideally only declaring them using DSC. You'll soon discover settings where the best you can do is snapshot the registry, change a setting in the GUI, snapshot the registry again, then take a diff so you can write the registry change into your PowerShell automation. If you're on a corporate machine, you'll also likely find many corners of PowerShell that you need closed off to you, anyway. At the end of the day, Windows is not friendly to automation because it's not CLI-first (not culturally and not technically).
- manofmanysmiles 16d agoI'm not sure why reading and writing the registry is considered a bad interface for programmatic system administration. I realize text files can be processed by utilities for working with text files. And text files can be read by humans without any tools, and in that sense are rather universal. I wonder what I'm missing. I'd go so far as to think an OS that had a database at its core, or perhaps a persistent lisp would be even more programmable and legible. Maybe better tools for dealing with structured data would help this?
- luma 16d agoYour argument is directed at Windows, not PowerShell. The shell is just a shell, if a certain thing you're looking to configure doesn't have an easy cmdlet, that doesn't mean powershell is bad, just that MS didn't give you the easy button. Similar to many unix tools, some of what you need to interact with has a dedicated CLI, other things have you poking at the configuration database directly (ini or yaml or whatever for unix, registry for windows). If you don't like the Windows style of configuration, run powershell on linux - it's awesome there too!
- drusepth 11d agoIronically, I feel like LLMs have really unlocked Windows work since they all know how to use Powershell and all the weird Windows commands/hacks that you otherwise either wouldn't even know about, or would have to Google every time. I used to hate working in Windows, but now it feels roughly comparable to Mac (though at the risk of inciting an OS war, I do feel like Linux still beats both out...)
- raincole 10d agoI totally agree. Powershell is a bit cryptic but it's really powerful especially on Windows. LLMs have smoothed out the learning curve.