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Comment by hoechst | Hacker News Reader

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 :(

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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.

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”.

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.

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.)

The purpose is not so much Claude Code, but that LLMs running semi-autonomously in a shell environment with access to Unix tools are powerful in a way that a web chatbot is not. Replace Claude Code with some other TUI such as opencode and, modulo some of the specifics of CC's implementation, the truth still stands.

In context of UNIX philosophy, something like llm(1) is probably a better option.

https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/

The point is that Claude Code is USING the unix world. Not that it IS the unix way.

UNIX is proprietary too, and also a kinda large monolith. UNIX philosophy or UNIX way is just the standard lingo to describe using many single-purpose (usually command line) programs to accomplish your task, there's nothing more to it, so this AI tool definitely is UNIXy in this way. I'm not old enough to even remember if that was how folks even actually used UNIX systems most of the time back in the days, but it doesn't really matter, that's just how we talk these days.

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.

And to create Lovecraftian horrors to fix.

With a Lovecraftian iä iä iä -chant you cant git reset Cthulhu back to its dimension.

With LLM Agents you can :D

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.

Use ffmpeg to extract the audio from the first ten seconds of an mp4 file and save it as mp3.

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

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

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