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Comment by tonyarkles | Hacker News Reader

There’s been an interesting co-evolution that I’ve been experiencing with Claude Code. I’ll ask it to do a task, I’ll watch what it’s doing (often lots of find and grep and ripgrep) and then after the task is complete I’ll ask it if there are any tools that would’ve made the job easier. This has led to tools like fzf and others (notmuch for indexing email, for example). I’ve then taken those tools and figured out how to work them into my own workflow, both CLI and Emacs.

We’ve also collaborated on some Python tooling that takes a rather slow data format that I often have to process and analyze, indexed the whole corpus, and for analysis I can do (or Claude Code can) a single-pass conversion to Parquet which is then queryable with DuckDB. That tool has dramatically improved my turnaround time on one-off analysis tasks and as a Python CLI tool using Typer, the interface is also nicely discoverable for LLM harnesses to work with.

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I wonder if you put job classifications along a spreadsheet's leftmost column (e.g. search in file, search in directory), and data types along a spreadsheet's topmost row (e.g. JSON file, macOS-based filesystem), would you end up finding gaps in the intersection of the columns and rows make these new tools you've created less surprising? For example, to "search a file" on a "macOS-based filesystem", you would naturally gravitate towards `grep`. Or to search the contents of a JSON file, you would maybe use `grep`, or perhaps `jq` and a well crafted query. Well, as you expand out the job classifications and data types (or some other abstraction), you start to realize where we don't have tools today. And then Claude can go and create those, perhaps even proposing a faster alternative!

> Or to search the contents of a JSON file, you would maybe use `grep`, or perhaps `jq` and a well crafted query

Try https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron.

I had a similar intuition that we could definitely optimize token efficiency and performance for non-general tasks.

For example, I was handling a lot of infra operations, many of which follow fixed workflows like locating a specific log in certain time range, identify the issue, and apply the appropriate mitigation steps. Since these workflows are entirely command-line based, I added a hook to Claude Code that monitors the commands I repeatedly run, including those invoked by Claude Code itself, and compiles them into reusable scripts(with skills as entries). It can work well.

The takeaway is that we should spend more time reviewing our own work patterns and workflows.

You should disclose that you are the co-author of this paper.

When you use “we” hopefully you are referring to someone on your team. Just be careful, the first step down the rabbit hole of AI psychosis is humanization of LLM.

It’s me and my plucky gang of agents!

Nah as long as you don't give them first-names, I think you should be ok. also:

Pretty pleaser please people don't get your agents registered as direct-reports in the org-chart with HR!

But how else am I supposed to collect their salary?

Is that how you got into this state?

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