My biggest pet peeve with agents is when people beg their (non-deterministic) agents to do something that a lint rule could've accomplished
My biggest pet peeve with agents is when people beg their (non-deterministic) agents to do something that a lint rule could've accomplished
Seems like 80% of agent use boils down to: grep | sed -i
Which is kind of cool if you’re unaware enough to know to do it yourself.
Oh, and find. Agents use find a lot.
It turns out that thinking about and executing these commands at a superhuman speed is, to ape Claude, the real unlock.
So it turns out that a lot of these unix utilities have such bad UX that having a tool that knows how to really leverage them feels like a superpower.
If you've ever used an LLM to deal with ffmpeg you'll know exactly what I mean.
It is incredibly difficult to make an UX that can beat simply typing what you need in your own words.
You think of what you need, and you type it. No need to even ask “what options should I use?”
I would rather bet that people don’t know that their problem has been solved for ages. Either they don’t know about the tools or can’t make the leap to think of using something like awk or sed to quickly script out their use cases. Or even quickly draft up a quick function/plugin in something like vim, emacs, sublime,…
In “The Pragmatic Programmer”, the power of unix tools and editor fluency is well argued. There are plenty of other books like “Unix Power Tools”, “Small, Sharp Software Tools”,…
Pi even installs ripgrep and fd if it can't find them in the path.