What I really want is all the shell commands to have an object (e.g. json) output mode. Then all my "glue" between tools becomes less bespoke and more standardized, e.g. jq. Instead of analyzing output to build weird grep and awk statements, I would just need to remember a couple of jq patterns, take a quick look at the output, and use one of my patterns to extract the data to stream to the next command.