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Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds

Honestly the top AI use case for me right now is personal throwaway dev tools. Where I used to write shell oneliners with dozen pipes including greps and seds and jq and other stuff, now I get an AI to write me a node script and throw in a nice Web UI to boot. Edit: reflecting on what the lesson is here, in either case I suppose we're avoiding the pain of dealing with Unix CLI tools :-D

jacquesm 1y ago
Interesting. You have to wonder if all the tools that is based on would have been written in the first place if that kind of thing had been possible all along. Who needs 'grep' when you can write a prompt?
- tptacek 1y ago
  My long running joke is that the actual good `jq` is just the LLM interface that generates `jq` queries; 'simonw actually went and built that.
  - dannyobrien 1y ago
    https://github.com/simonw/llm-jq https://github.com/simonw/llm-jq for those following along at home https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd is what i use as the "actually good ffmpeg etc front end" and just to toot my own horn, I hand Simon's `llm` command lone tool access to its own todo list and read/write access to the cwd with my own tools, https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-todo https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-todo and https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-patch https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-patch Even with just these and no shell access it can get a lot done, because these tools encode the fundamental tricks of Claude Code ( I have `llmw` aliased to `llm --tool Patch --tool Todo --cl 0` so it will have access to these tools and can act in a loop, as Simon defines an agent. )
  - a-french-anon 1y ago
    Tried gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) a bit? If you know your UNIX, I think it can replace jq in a lot of cases. And when it can't, well, you can reach for Python, I guess.
- agumonkey 1y ago
  It's highly plausible that all we assumed was good design / engineering will disappear if LLMs/Agents can produce more without having the be modular. (sadly)
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    There is some kind of parallel behind 'AI' and 'Fuzzy Logic'. Fuzzy logic to me always appeared like a large number of patches to get enough coverage for a system to work even if you didn't understand it. AI just increases the number of patches to billions.
    - agumonkey 1y ago
      true, there's often a point where your system becomes a blurry miracle
andai 1y ago
Could you give some examples? I'm having the AI write the shell scripts, wondering if I'm missing out on some comfy UIs...
- foobarian 1y ago
  I was debugging a service that was spitting out a particular log line. I gave Copilot an example line, told it to write a script that tails the log line and serves a UI via port 8080 with a table of those log lines parsed and printed nicely. Then I iterated by adding filter buttons, aggregation stats, simple things like that. I asked it to add a "clear" button to reset the UI. I probably would not even have done this without an AI because the CLI equivalent would be parsing out and aggregating via some form of uniq -c | sort -n with a bunch of other tuning and it would be too much trouble.
- sumedh 1y ago
  It can be anything. It depends on what you want to do with the output. You can have a simple dashboard site which collects the data from our shell scripts and shows your a summary or red/green signals so that you can focus on things which are interested in.

jacquesm 1y ago

Interesting. You have to wonder if all the tools that is based on would have been written in the first place if that kind of thing had been possible all along. Who needs 'grep' when you can write a prompt?

tptacek 1y ago
My long running joke is that the actual good `jq` is just the LLM interface that generates `jq` queries; 'simonw actually went and built that.
- dannyobrien 1y ago
  https://github.com/simonw/llm-jq https://github.com/simonw/llm-jq for those following along at home https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd is what i use as the "actually good ffmpeg etc front end" and just to toot my own horn, I hand Simon's `llm` command lone tool access to its own todo list and read/write access to the cwd with my own tools, https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-todo https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-todo and https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-patch https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-patch Even with just these and no shell access it can get a lot done, because these tools encode the fundamental tricks of Claude Code ( I have `llmw` aliased to `llm --tool Patch --tool Todo --cl 0` so it will have access to these tools and can act in a loop, as Simon defines an agent. )
- a-french-anon 1y ago
  Tried gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) a bit? If you know your UNIX, I think it can replace jq in a lot of cases. And when it can't, well, you can reach for Python, I guess.
agumonkey 1y ago
It's highly plausible that all we assumed was good design / engineering will disappear if LLMs/Agents can produce more without having the be modular. (sadly)
- jacquesm 1y ago
  There is some kind of parallel behind 'AI' and 'Fuzzy Logic'. Fuzzy logic to me always appeared like a large number of patches to get enough coverage for a system to work even if you didn't understand it. AI just increases the number of patches to billions.
  - agumonkey 1y ago
    true, there's often a point where your system becomes a blurry miracle

andai 1y ago

Could you give some examples? I'm having the AI write the shell scripts, wondering if I'm missing out on some comfy UIs...

foobarian 1y ago
I was debugging a service that was spitting out a particular log line. I gave Copilot an example line, told it to write a script that tails the log line and serves a UI via port 8080 with a table of those log lines parsed and printed nicely. Then I iterated by adding filter buttons, aggregation stats, simple things like that. I asked it to add a "clear" button to reset the UI. I probably would not even have done this without an AI because the CLI equivalent would be parsing out and aggregating via some form of uniq -c | sort -n with a bunch of other tuning and it would be too much trouble.
sumedh 1y ago
It can be anything. It depends on what you want to do with the output. You can have a simple dashboard site which collects the data from our shell scripts and shows your a summary or red/green signals so that you can focus on things which are interested in.