Comment by simonw

On the second tab (which is a text/browser interface to the VM) here: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=buildroot , you can start sh shell, and run arbitrary commands, and see output. making a programmatic i/o stream is left as an exercise (to claude perhaps :).

One of the very first experiments I did with AI was trying to build a browser based filesystem interface and general API provider. I think the first attempts were with ChatGPT 3.5 . I pretty quickly hit a wall, but Gpt4 got me quite a lot further.

I see the datestamp on this early test https://fingswotidun.com/tests/messageAPI/ is 2023-03-22 Thinking about the progress since then I'm amazed I got as far as I did. (To get the second window to run its test you need to enter aWorker.postMessage("go") in the console)

The design was using IndexedDB to make a very simple filesystem, and a transmittable API

The source of the worker shows the simplicity of it once set up. https://fingswotidun.com/tests/messageAPI/testWorker.js in total is just

    importScripts("MessageTunnel.js"); // the only dependency of the worker
  
    onmessage = function(e) {
     console.log(`Worker: Message  received from main script`,e.data);
     if (e.data.apiDefinition) {
       installRemoteAPI(e.data.apiDefinition,e.ports[0])    
     }
     if (e.data=="go") {
       go();
       return;
     } 
  }
  
  async function go() {
      const thing = await testAPI.echo("hello world")
      console.log("got a thing back ",thing)
  
      //fs is provided by installRemoteAPI  
      const rootInfo = await fs.stat("/");
      console.log(`stat("/") returned `,rootInfo)
    
      // fs.readDir returns an async iterator that awaits on an iterator on the host side 
      const dir = await fs.readDir("/")
      for await (const f of dir) {
        const stats = await fs.stat("/"+f.name);
        console.log("file  " +f,stats)
      }
    
  }

I distinctly remember adding a Serviceworker so you could fetch URLs from inside the filesystem, so I must have a more recent version sitting around somewhere.

It wouldn't take too much to have a $PATH analog and a command executor that launched a worker from a file on the system if it found a match existed on the $PATH. Then a LLM would be able to make its own scripts from there.

It might be time to revisit this. Polishing everything up would probably be a piece of cake for Claude.