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Comment by bangonkeyboard | Hacker News Reader

> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.

"Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

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Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.

"Hunt the verb" can be alleviated to some degree for programs that require parameters by just showing the manpage when invalid or missing parameters are specified. It's highly frustrating when programs require you to go through every possible help parameter until you get lucky.

Per the thread OP, nobody pretends that CLIs do not need a manual.

Many users like myself enjoy a good manual and will lean into a CLI at every opportunity. This is absolutely counter to the value proposition of a natural language assistant.

I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

Wow, I now feel old.

To be super pedantic, wouldn’t the interface to a shell itself be a Command Line Interface? ;)

that’s the ambiguity that I think is tripping the discussion up a little. Also the idea of a CLI/Shell/Terminal is also quite coupled to a system, rather than services. Hence the whole ‘web service’ hope to normalise remote APIs that if you squint hard enough become ‘curl’ on the command line

But the point is none of that is intrinsic or interesting to the underlying idea, it’s just of annoying practical relevance to interfacing with APIs today

Yes. But I think the point is a good one. With CLI there is a recognition that there must be a method of learning what the verbs are. And there are many traditions which give us expectations and defaults. That doesn’t exist in the chat format.

Every time I try to interact with one of these llm gatekeepers I just say what I want and hope it figures out to send me to a person. The rest of the time I’m trying to convince the Taco Bell to record a customer complaint about how its existence itself is dystopian.

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