Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

https://www.alephic.com/writing/the-magic-of-claude-code

by noahbrier • 10 months ago

414 214 10 months ago

alephic.com

xorvoid• 10 months ago

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

smm11• 10 months ago

Apple then.

p_ing2• 10 months ago

That rules out the open source part.

eadmund• 10 months ago

Local Org mode, local LLM, all orchestrated with Emacs, all free software.

If only I were retired and had infinite time!

gchamonlive5• 10 months 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.

tsimionescu3• 10 months ago

Good luck understanding the biases in a petabyte of text and images and video, or whatever the training set is.

noahbrier9• 10 months ago

Seems like this might be possible with opencode? Haven't played much.

buzzy_hacker• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

So you’re just storing bunch of forks of open source projects with some AI-generated changes applied to them?

nwsm• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

Maybe this is of interest https://laurentcazanove.com/blog/obsidian-rag-api

BirAdam• 10 months ago

LM Studio + aider

xnx• 10 months 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.

noahbrier9• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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.

lupusreal4• 10 months 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.

fragmede4• 10 months 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.

maleldil3• 10 months ago

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.

libraryofbabel2• 10 months ago

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.

ozgrakkurt• 10 months ago

How is this better than calling `cargo clippy` or similar commands yourself?

hboon• 10 months ago

How does Claude Code use the browser in your script/tool? I've always wanted to control my existing Safari session windows rather than a Chrome or a separate/new Chrome instance.

wraptile2• 10 months ago

Most browsers these days expose a control API (like ChromeDevtools Protocol MCP [1]) that open up a socket API and can take in json instructions for bidirectional communication. Chrome is the gold standard here but both Safari and Firefox have their own driver.

For you existing browser session you'd have to start it already with open socket connection as by default that's not enabled but once you do the server should able to find an open local socket and connect to it and execute controls.

worth nothing that this "control browser" hype is quite deceiving and it doesn't really work well imo because LLMs still suck at understanding the DOM so you need various tricks to optimize for that so I would take OP's claims with a giant bag of salt.

Also these automations are really easy to identify and block as they are not organic inputs so the actual use is very limited.

- https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/chrome-devtools-mcp/

kristopolous2• 10 months ago

I updated this thing that searches manpages better recently for the LLM era:

https://github.com/day50-dev/Mansnip

wrapping this in an STDIO mcp is probably a smart move.

I should just api-ify the code and include the server in the pip. How hard could this possibly be...

lelandfe• 10 months ago

You know, I have heard some countries are making mansnip illegal these days

mac-attack2• 10 months ago

Definitely searched apt on Debian before I installed the pip pkg. On a somewhat related note, I also thought something broke when `uv tool install mansnip` didn't work.

the_real_cher• 10 months ago

It will navigate and know how to fill out forms?

jmull2• 10 months 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.

noahbrier9• 10 months 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.

Gerardo12• 10 months 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.

lupusreal4• 10 months ago

I agree, I was very skeptical until I started playing around with these tools and repeatedly got good results with almost no real effort.

Online discussion with randos about this topic is almost useless because everybody is quick to dismiss the other side as hopelessly brainwashed by hype, or burying their heads in the sand for fear of the future of their jobs. I've had much better luck talking about it with people I've known and had mutual respect with before all this stuff came out.

ploxiln• 10 months ago

I've seen a bunch of big companies have edicts sent down from the top, "all employees should be using LLMs, if you're not then you're not doing your job". But many employees just don't have much that it applies to. Like, I spend a huge amount of time reviewing PRs. (Somebody, who actually knows stuff, has to do it.) Some of the more data-sci guys have added LLM review bots to some repos, but they're rather dumb and useless.

(And then the CISO sends some security tips email/slack announcement which is still dumb and useless even after an LLM added a bunch of emojis and fun language to it.)

I've always been an old-fashioned and slow developer. But it still seems to me, if most "regular" "average" developers churn out code that is more of a liability than an asset, if they can do that 10x faster, it doesn't really change the world. Most stuff still ends up waiting, in the end, for some slow work done right, or else gets thrown away soon enough.

zhengyi13• 10 months ago

I think that a lot of very basic LLM use cases come down to articulating your need. If you're not the sort of person who's highly articulate, this is likely to be difficult for you.

I'm personally in the habit of answering even slightly complex questions by first establishing shared context - that is, I very carefully ensure that my conversational partner has exactly the same understanding of the situation that I do. I do this because it's frequently the case that we don't have a lot of overlap in our understanding, or we have very specific gaps or contradictions in our understanding.

If you're like many in this industry, you're working in a language other than what you were raised in, making all of this more difficult.

jmull2• 10 months ago

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 the idea that LLMs make highly custom software feasible, like your "claudsidian" system... that people will be able to get the software they want by describing it rather than being limited to finding something preexisting and having to adapting to it. As you point out, the unix philosophy is one way -- simple, unopinionated, building blocks an LLM can compose out of user-level prompts.

skydhash4• 10 months ago

I read the whole thing and could still not figure out what they’re trying to solve. Which I’m pretty sure goes against the Unix philosophy. The one thing should be clearly defined to be able to declare that you solve it well.

noahbrier9• 10 months ago

What the company is trying to solve or what I'm solving with Claude Code?

clickety_clack3• 10 months ago

I disagree actually. Saying things like “everyone else managed to figure it out” is a way of creating FOMO. It might not be the way you want to do it, marketing doesn’t have to be nice (or even right) to work.

dsr_• 10 months ago

I don't want to work with people who think that's good marketing, or people who are convinced by it.

FOMO is for fashions and fads, not getting things done.

mrguyorama2• 10 months ago

"Good marketing" doesn't have to mean "Marketing that is maximally effective"

Filling food with opioids would be great for business, but hopefully you understand how that is not "good business"

ryandrake2• 10 months ago

It's a totally backwards way to build a product.

You're supposed to start with a use case that is unmet, and research/build technology to enable and solve the use case.

AI companies are instead starting with a specific technology, and then desperately searching for use cases that might somehow motivate people to use that technology. Now these guys are further arguing that it should be the user's problem to find use cases for the technology they seem utterly convinced needs to be developed.

Frenchgeek• 10 months ago

Is "finding a way to remove them, with prejudice, from my phone" a valid use case for them? I'm tired of Gemini randomly starting up.

(Well, I recently found there is a reason for it: I'm left handed and unlocking my phone with my left hand sometimes touch the icon stupidly put by default on the lock screen. Not that it would work: My phone is usually running with data disabled.)

dannyobrien• 10 months ago

Another everything-is-new-again: 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 )

boredumb• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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

sneak2• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

So your goal in your one and only life is to write notes in your code repo that you don't want subpoenaed?

sneak2• 10 months ago

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” —Oscar Wilde

blibble• 10 months ago

LLMs are one large binary that does everything (maybe, if you are lucky today)

exact opposite of the unix philosophy

dragonwriter• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

wait until you find out about human programmers...

rhubarbtree• 10 months ago

They write the individual tools that do the one specific thing?

kfarr• 10 months ago

They’re one gigantic organic blob?

floatrock• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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

Kim_Bruning• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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.

soperj• 10 months ago

OSX gave us a proper Unix shell

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

heavyset_go2• 10 months ago

There was a period in the early-mid 2000s where CLIs were considered passe and an emblem of the past. Some developers relied solely on graphical IDEs on GUI-oriented operating systems, and the transition to Linux everywhere broke that trend. Some people didn't take Linux seriously because it was CLI oriented.

lupusreal4• 10 months ago

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.

phito3• 10 months ago

Then it'll loop back again to CLI (or even direct system calls...) once human input won't be necessary anymore.

theshrike795• 10 months ago

My main problem with GUI tooling is that keyboard use is an afterthought in too many of them

With CLI and TUI tools it's keyboard first and the mouse might work if it wasn't too much of a hassle for the dev.

And another issue with GUI tooling is the lack of composability. With a CLI I can input files to one program grab the output and give it to another and another with ease.

With GUI tools I need to have three of them open at the same time and manually open each one. Or find a single tool that does all three things properly.

itissid• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

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

mike_ivanov2• 10 months 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_ing2• 10 months 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.

anthk3• 10 months 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.

array_key_first• 10 months 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.

antonvs2• 10 months ago

Many modern web apps are just APIs with a browser GUI.

wpm• 10 months ago

I weep for what happened to AppKit/Cocoa

mike_ivanov2• 10 months ago

I'd say ROS (Robot Operating System) is the closest to this ideal.

topaz0• 10 months ago

Just because it says compostable on the container doesn't mean it will actually break down in a reasonable amount of time on your home compost heap, or that they don't leach some environmentally harmful chemicals in the process.

jadeopteryx• 10 months ago

Apple ShortCuts and AppleScript integration is also cool.

sarbajitsaha• 10 months ago

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

jasonsb• 10 months 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• 10 months 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

simonw4• 10 months 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• 10 months 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).

fragmede4• 10 months ago

Between codex and Claude code, I am using both on two entirely different projects, so it's not a fair comparison, but the two things Claude has in my unscientific testing is a better plan mode (though having to use the magic password ultrathink belies needing to learn how to prompt it properly) resulting in a better and longer Todo.md (but again, the two projects between the two are very different, so don't consider it a scientific comparison). The other thing that Claude code has that codex does not is a more advanced ability to run things in the background, both as in "npm run dev"/other webserver in the background and being able to run curl/whatever against it, and gather logs from the webserver, error message or otherwise. The other thing is Claude code can be told to run things "in sub-agents" and work on multiple things simultaneously. If there is a way to get codex to do it, it won't tell me and says it can't do that. Not that I necessarily believe it. My experience with codex is that, despite instructions in agents.md, it'll forget and get its wires crossed. I'm using --model gpt-5-codex, and codex reports version 0.42.0.

dudeinhawaii• 10 months ago

I've found GPT-5-Codex (the model used by default by OpenAI Codex CLI) to be superior but, as others have stated, slower.

Caveat, requires a linux environment, OSX, or WSL.

In general, I find that it will write smarter code, perform smarter refactors, and introduce less chaos into my codebase.

I'm not talking about toy codebases. I use agents on large codebases with dozens of interconnected tools and projects. Claude can be a bit of a nightmare there because it's quite myopic. People rave about it, but I think that's because they're effectively vibe-coding vastly smaller, tight-scoped things like tools and small websites.

On a larger project, you need a model to take the care to see what existing patterns you're using in your code, whether something's already been done, etc. Claude tends to be very fast but generate redundant code or comical code (let's try this function 7 different ways so that one of those ways will pass). This is junior coder bullshit. GPT-5-Codex isn't perfect but there's far far less of that. It takes maybe 5x longer but generates something that I have more confidence in.

I also see Codex using tools more in smart ways. If it's refactoring, it'll often use tools to copy code rather than re-writing the code. Re-writing code is how so many bugs have been introduced by LLMs.

I've not played with Sonnet 4.5 yet so it may have improved things!

phainopepla22• 10 months ago

Codex-cli doesn't require Linux or WSL. I've been using it on Windows all week. That said, the model seems to get confused by Powershell from time to time, but who doesn't?

theshrike795• 10 months ago

Codex with gpt-5-codex (high) is like an outsourced consultant. You give them the specs and a while later you get the output. It doesn't communicate much during the run (especially the VSCode plugin is really quiet).

Then you check the result and see what happened. It's pretty good at one-shotting things if it gets the gist, but if it goes off the rails you can't go back three steps and redirect.

On the other hand Claude Code is more like pair programming, it's chatting about while doing things, telling you what it's doing and why "out loud". It's easier to interrupt it when you see it going off track, it'll just stop and ask for more instructions (unlike Copilot where if you don't want it to rm the database.file you need to be really fast and skip the operation AND hit the stop button below the chatbox).

I use both regularly, GPT is when I know what to do and have it typed out. Claude is for experimenting and dialogue like "what would be a good idea here?" type of stuff.

dizhn• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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.

drdaeman3• 10 months 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”.

simonw4• 10 months ago

The Unix philosophy here is less about it being a terminal app (it's a very rich terminal app, lots of redrawing the whole screen etc) and more about the fact that giving a modern LLM the ability to run shell commands unlocks an incredibly useful array of new capabilities.

An LLM can do effectively anything that a human can do by typing commands into a shell now.

anthk3• 10 months ago

And to create Lovecraftian horrors to fix.

lottin• 10 months ago

I can't imagine a situation in which I'd want to explain what I want to do on the command line to an LLM, instead of typing the commands myself.

scuff3d• 10 months ago

The top three comments I saw also all sound like they were written by an LLM that was told to advertise itself.

mac-attack2• 10 months ago

Please read the article before commenting. It actually references the tenets of Unix and how it is ideal for tool calling

BenoitEssiambre• 10 months 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.

supportengineer• 10 months 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• 10 months 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..."

luhsprwhkv23• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

Do you automate this process

luhsprwhkv23• 10 months 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.

phito3• 10 months 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.

luhsprwhkv23• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

The author may like 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.

globular-toast• 10 months 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.

sakoht• 10 months 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.

BatteryMountain2• 10 months 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).

ACCount372• 10 months 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?

BatteryMountain2• 10 months 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.

resonious• 10 months ago

Similar thing happened to me when it busted out the AWS CLI and figured out a problem with my terraform.

eddyfromtheblok• 10 months ago

Yes, and on top of this, having MCP servers that can reference AWS docs and terraform provider docs has been a godsend

ljm• 10 months ago

This is also a fantastic way for someone to learn the principle of least privilege by setting up a very strict IAM profile for the agent to use without the risk of nuking the system.

user3939382• 10 months ago

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

assimpleaspossi• 10 months 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• 10 months 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."

Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

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