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(most) Kids will likely never learn these command and attributes and output like we passionately did in 1994. LLMs be spittin' them command lines quick and corr
by larodi 2y ago
(most) Kids will likely never learn these command and attributes and output like we passionately did in 1994. LLMs be spittin' them command lines quick and correct, transpiled/translated from English/French/...Macedonian if you like. they already do, and it already helps a lot.
Perhaps one may learn to remember <df> and <ls -a>, but will definitely not care to produce by heart oneliner bash abominations sprinkled with sygils and pipes and three-char cmd names.
This whole article very true, but somewhat irrelevant to 2024. Claude/Mistral/CHatGPT been parsing outputs perfectly, and there are plenty of experiments into getting the LLM to assist code writing and parsing results directly from the cmdline. And you know what, this also works in 100% console mode, you don't need GUI to talk to the new GUI called LLM.
the smaller models get, the sooner they get embedded in shells. then you'll get the real Ghost in the Shell, yeah...
- cybrox 2y agoNothing I'm looking forward to than a generation of sysadmins who use 99% correct commands and get the output parsed for them 99% correct.
- larodi 2y agosomehow my gut feeling is they are not going to ask for old gen sysadmin's opinion, but the contrary - would love to make them outraged, as my generation script-kiddies-soon-to-become whitehat hackers did. we can expect sysadmins to grow into typical BOFHs and BDFLs... besides this comment of yours is exactly what was expected as a first response, and is very boring.
- thomashop 2y agoIsn't the chance for a human sysadmin to get wrong just as high? I think I've worked with some very good and very bad human system administrators. The good ones will produce more reliable code than current LLMs. But on average, I don't think so.
- atoav 2y agoAs a youngling I have to say, I always liked the idea of the shell as something where you can pipe stuff inbetween programs. It is a genius concept. The problem is that in the real world implementation of the idea you have something like bash, that sucks for text processing with all its footguns of unescaped strings, spaces, wildcard operators and such. Maybe it has to do with strings not really having been a first class citizen in C? Processing strings in C is a (dangerous) pain even in the year 2024. I often find myself just writing python scripts calling subprocesses (if needed, so much is already included), ideally with a --json option so I get proper machine-readable output. This has shown to be far more stable and reliable than bash.
- larodi 2y agoAnd eventually you come to conclusion that you need powershell like pipes of objects. Btw someone tried to implement a shell in Python which feeds structures, not sure the name though… was in HN front a while ago
- lucianbr 2y ago> This whole article very true, but somewhat irrelevant to 2024. The author is complaining about inconvenience. If I'm in the shell, and I want to see how much disk space I have, asking a LLM for a command then running the command then asking the LLM to parse it is still inconvenient, compared to just typing "df -h" and getting a reasonable output. The fact that Claude or whoever can parse that output seems irrelevant to the article as I understand it. "AI" is not a magic silver bullet.
- larodi 2y agoIs not indeed. The author has valid clues and points made. 100% agree with him. Nevertheless you still need to do some job and people find ways around. All I’m saying is long prompts of shell progs that you need to use once or twice are easier written in the newskool way, not that proper output of common programs is bad idea. But I really can’t imagine anyone or anything convincing thousands of devs to conform certain format. Really a wet dream today unless started so from day one. Only big players can do that.