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Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read an

Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.

storystarling 9mo ago
Matches my experience with print-on-demand workflows. I tried using vision models to validate things like ICC profiles and total ink density, but they usually just hallucinate that the file is compliant. I ended up giving the agent access to ImageMagick to run analysis directly. It’s the only reliable way to catch issues before sending files to fulfillment, otherwise you end up eating the cost of failed prints.
- jtbayly 9mo ago
  I don’t understand why you’d try to use an LLM for that step if there is already a tool that you can call to check it. Help me out.
ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
> They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems trivial to implement reading the magic bytes. I haven't tested it, but I'd expect most linux image displayers/editors to automatically work with misnamed files as that is almost entirely the purpose of magic bytes. Personally, I think Microsoft is to blame for everyone relying on file extensions too much as it was a bad idea which led to a lot of security issues.
lpcvoid 9mo ago
I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.
- toddmorey 9mo ago
  Well LLMs do make normal Linux tooling more accessible. I needed a video reformatted to a new aspect ratio and codec and Claude produced a rather complex set of arguments for ffmpeg that I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own.
- darknoon 9mo ago
  I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!
  - lpcvoid 9mo ago
    # curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file - /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.
    - simonw 9mo ago
      ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.
      - lpcvoid 9mo ago
        If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?
        simonw 9mo ago
        "Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.
        9mo ago

storystarling 9mo ago

Matches my experience with print-on-demand workflows. I tried using vision models to validate things like ICC profiles and total ink density, but they usually just hallucinate that the file is compliant. I ended up giving the agent access to ImageMagick to run analysis directly. It’s the only reliable way to catch issues before sending files to fulfillment, otherwise you end up eating the cost of failed prints.

jtbayly 9mo ago
I don’t understand why you’d try to use an LLM for that step if there is already a tool that you can call to check it. Help me out.

ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago

> They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems trivial to implement reading the magic bytes. I haven't tested it, but I'd expect most linux image displayers/editors to automatically work with misnamed files as that is almost entirely the purpose of magic bytes. Personally, I think Microsoft is to blame for everyone relying on file extensions too much as it was a bad idea which led to a lot of security issues.

lpcvoid 9mo ago

I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.

toddmorey 9mo ago
Well LLMs do make normal Linux tooling more accessible. I needed a video reformatted to a new aspect ratio and codec and Claude produced a rather complex set of arguments for ffmpeg that I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own.
darknoon 9mo ago
I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!
- lpcvoid 9mo ago
  # curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file - /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.
  - simonw 9mo ago
    ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.
    - lpcvoid 9mo ago
      If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?
      - simonw 9mo ago
        "Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.
        9mo ago