[procone]

Why rethink tools that have existed since the 70s and function predictably for a landscape that drastically shifts every two months? Seems shortsighted to me.

[psifertex]

IDEs have changed a lot in the last 50 years. Just like we shouldn't advocate for hand writing assembly for all code, we shouldn't be stuck using CLI tooling the same way.

I share your apprehension regarding the current AI landscape changing so quickly it causes whiplash but I don't think a mindset of "it's been fine for 50 years" is going to survive the pace of development possible by better LLM integration.

[skydhash]

The reason that tools have not changed that much is that our needs haven't changed that much either. Even something like `find` or `ffmpeg`, while complex, are not that complicated to use. They just require you to have a clear idea of what you want. And the latter is why most people advocating for LLMs want to avoid.

IDEs have not changed that much. They've always been an editor superchaged with tools that will all share the same context of a "project". And for development, it's always been about navigation (search and goto), compile/build, and run.

[withzombies]

Many of the changes that would work for LLMs would also be beneficial to users.

[skydhash]

Not at all. The shell already provide us ways to get contextual information (PS1, ...). And the commands generally provides error message or error code.

In one of the example provided:

  $ sdfsdf
  zsh: command not found: 'sdfsdf'
  zsh: current directory is /Users/ryan
  zsh: Perhaps you meant to run: cd agent_directory; sdfsdf

You could just use `pwd`, like most people that put the current directory in the $PS1 to make sure that the agent stays in the correct directory.

[procone]

I'm sorry, but no. The tools work. I don't need "more context" from my `less` or `more` commands. The LLM can train on the man pages just as a human can read the man pages.

[ivape]

I also feel like command line agents are pretty simple. It's tailor made for tool-use.

while(true):

>> User requests something

<< The LLM picks a cli tool from an index

<< LLM grabs the manual for the tool to get the list of commands

<< Attempts to fulfill the request

I would not be shocked if engineers have already managed to overcomplicate these agents.

[kjkjadksj]

You can pretty much obviate that with an alias that catches the user requesting something then operates deterministically. What is nice about aliases is you don’t need to learn other peoples semantic patterns, you craft ones that make sense to you and your use cases then they always work and consume virtually no resources to work.