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A lot more tricks can be learned from just watching AI work. Instead of allowing AI to work autonomously, go back to the old days where you manually approve eve
by kccqzy 17d ago
A lot more tricks can be learned from just watching AI work. Instead of allowing AI to work autonomously, go back to the old days where you manually approve every command the AI runs. Just recently while doing performance optimization work, I found Opus using the `perf` command in ways I didn’t know possible. Just give AI a real task and carefully read what commands are used by the AI to solve the problem; most likely the AI uses a trick or two that you didn’t know existed.
- teekert 17d agoThis is interesting, I also do this, it will not let me remember the commands, but, I will learn what is possible and roughly how. And in this day and age that is more important. Just like stamping knowledge into your head also became less important (but not 0 important) with books and the internet.
- louthy 17d ago> “the old days” Is this just plain old rage baiting? I literally can’t tell any more.
- kccqzy 17d agoIt’s a figure of speech. I use that phrase for anything older than three months.
- lencastre 17d agoto shreds you say
- AIiscoming 17d agoI find it a valid statement. IT was always fast, and I explained my students what IDE cable was and they don't even knew about SWAP because they never had memory issues.
- dhosek 14d agoMy kids find mechanical disks (let alone things like CDs/DVDs or (gasp) vinyl) to be bizarre concepts. The fact that the disk drives for the IBM mainframe that I worked with in the mid-to-late 80s were the size of a washing machine absolutely blows them away.
- bigstrat2003 17d ago> go back to the old days where you manually approve every command the AI runs Those are also the current days if you have any sense. It's a bad idea to run an LLM with access to your machine at all, but if you absolutely must, you better review everything it does to make sure it doesn't run anything insane.
- kccqzy 17d agoThey run in a container with no network access, no data access other than the project folder.
- TeMPOraL 17d agoSo say people so afraid of LLMs they don't even use them :). The rest of us picks a level between "approve some" and "YOLO" depending on how much they worry about having to clean up the workspace afterwards. Encouraging using the repo and some dedicated per-session storage, while discouraging changes to global state (like installing packages system-wide) reduces cleanup problem to "every now and then `rm -rf` some agent session dirs".
- kittikitti 16d agoThe last time I did this, the AI was markedly worse and it took a few days of development time to undo it. Then Claude blamed me for it when asking about the root cause in a retrospective.
- Squeeeez 16d agoWelll... If you lend $100 to a hobo, would you really blame them when they run away with it?
- throwaway219450 17d agoThere are several keyboard shortcuts that you would never find out from watching an agent, but are mindblowing to new Linux users. I suck at remembering vim keybindings, but I have ingrained ctrl+a ctrl+e for jumping to the start/end of a string (which also works all over OS X). I had been a developer for an embarassing amount of time before I discovered those. There are other terminal specific shortcuts for removing last word (ctrl+w) but they don't seem to be as portable.
- gosub100 17d agoAnother one, not quite as handy but still awesome: ctrl s / ctrl-q. This freezes/unfreezes the terminal output so you can read it, without interrupting your program. Useful for very fast walls of text.
- TeMPOraL 17d agoOh so that is what this is for. I thought ctrl-q / ctrl-s are there as a nasty way to screw with users, who every now and then accidentally press one of these, and find their terminal frozen and no longer visibly reacting to input, for no apparent reason.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- zem 17d agothere was an old riddle I saw on usenet, "there is a key I use for one of its intended purposes several times a day, but when it stopped working I never missed it. what key was that?". the answer was the caps lock key, one of whose intended purposes was reverting back to normal after accidentally pressing it to go into caps mode.
- abustamam 16d agoI rebind capslock on all my new computers, usually to ctrl or cmd.
- noduerme 17d agoThis makes me think of something I hate about how LLMs write CLI scripts. Even with the same model on the same day, there's never any consistency with the way CLI arguments are written or handled. Sometimes they want to split on an equal sign, and specifically write that into the code. Other times they write code to pair keys and values based on spacing and order, even and odd. --date=2026-09-16 --date 20260916 and all variations thereof. It's annoying enough to have to check which script expects what format that I probably should've wasted some time or tokens to align them all, or at least put it into an MD file. But it's just an illustration of how LLMs can make CLI commands more obscure than they need to be.
- butterNaN 16d agoEh sometimes it overcomplicates things. I have seen Opus 5 do mad shell gymnastics for something that could have been a simple `jq`.
- shinyoo 16d agoThat is indeed a good way to pick up new tricks with AI! But I'm afraid a lot of us will just end up mindlessly pressing "Approve". I doubt people will have the energy to pause and look at the reasoning behind each output when they're overwhelmed by the sheer volume and speed of AI output. And more fundamentally, I know it can be fun to learn new tricks, but I agree with phforms that if you don’t use them often enough, the novelty wears off quickly. And with AI taking over more of the work that used to help us learn by doing, we may end up with even fewer chances to actually internalize those skills.