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Comment by fabiensanglard | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the motivation is to make Ai agents work better on Windows?

The intent was simply to give people coming from macOS and Linux more of the CLI tools they're familiar with. In other words, agents weren't the focus at all. But if it ends up helping them, that's a good added benefit of course.

Could come pre-installed with cygwin instead.

Cygwin isn't native Windows. Cygwin does many unholy things to enable signals and fork syscall in binaries.

uutils enables fully Windows native commands in the subset of system calls and disk structure Windows supports.

For sure. I wonder how long until the agents learn about this though. At least a year, right?

nope. With ClaudeCode you can create skills ( basically markdown instructions) to teach your agents what command to use. You can also update CLAUDE.md to inject custom instructions that are feeded anything ClaudeCode is started.

If that was sufficient wouldn't it just be easier to map to the Powershell commands directly?

Claude code (at least the cli) has this, their code leaked so you can see their extensive (1000+ LOC) PowerShell took script.

Tool* (no edit button?)

Or you can tell your agent about it in one line of AGENTS.md.

Agents / models don't need to "learn" about this.

When on Windows, the models default to bash / coreutils conventions until they realize it doesn't work / not available unless explicitly instructed otherwise.

Even on Mac, they tend to default to bash instead of running things in zsh.

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