Comment by Wowfunhappy
1 month ago
LLMs operate on text. They can take in text, and they can produce text. Yes, some LLMs can also read and even produce images, but at least as of today, they are clearly much better at using text[1].
So cat, ripgrep, etc are the right tools for them. They need a command line, not a GUI.
1: Maybe you'd argue that Nano Banana is pretty good. But would you say its prompt adherence is good enough to produce, say, a working Scratch program?
Inputs to functions are text, as in variables, or file names, directory names, symbol names with symbol searching. Outputs you get from these functions for things like symbol searching is text too, or at least easily reformatted to text. Like API calls are all just text input and output.
Yes, and I frequently see Claude Code start with tools that retrieve these things when it's doing work. What are you surprised it isn't using?