Comment by jampekka
5 days ago
Lots of scepticism here, but I think this may really take off. After 25 years of heavy CLI use, lately I've found myself using codex (in terminal) for terminal tasks I've previously done using CLI commands.
If someone manages to make a robust GUI version of this for normies, people will lap it up. People don't want to juggle applications, we want computers to do what we want/need them to do.
I agree. As a long time linux user, coding assistants as interface to the OS has been a delight to discover. The cryptic totality of commands, parameters, config files, logs has been simplified into natural language: "Claude, I want to test monokai color scheme on my sway environment" and possibly hours of tweaking done in seconds. My setup has never been so customized, because there is no friction now. I love it and I predict this will increase, even if slightly, the real user base of linux desktops.
Heavily agreed - LLMs are also really good at diagnosing crash logs, and sifting through what would otherwise be inscrutably large core dumps.
Do you think this will continue growing if we stop struggling and posting our findings on forums?
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Longtime Linux+Unix user here too, I'm in the same boat, and it's been stunning what it can do.
A few days ago we were having networking problems, and while I was flipping over to my cell hotspot to see if it was "us or them" having the problem, a coworker asked claude to diagnose it. It determined the issue was "a bad peering connection in IX-Denver between our ISP and Fastly and the ISP needs to withdraw that advertisement." That sounded plausible to me, I happened to know that both Fastly and our ISP peered at IX-Denver. That night I reached out to the ISP and asked them if that's what happened and they confirmed it. In the time it took me to mess around with my hotspot, claude was doing traceroutes, using looking glasses, looking at ASN peering databases...
It is REALLY good at automating things via scripts. Right now I have it building a script to run our Kafka rolling updates process. And it did a better job than I did at updating the Ansible YML files that control it.
I've been getting ready to switch over to NixOS, and Claude is amazing at managing the nix config. It even packaged the "git butler CLI" tool for me; NixOS only had the GUI available.
I'm getting into the habit of every few days asking it: "Here is the syslog from my production fleet, review it for security problems and come up with the top 5 actionable steps I can take to improve." That's what identified the kafka config changes leading to the rolling update above, for example.
I recently accidentally broke my GUI / Wayland and was delighted to realize that I can have codex/claude fix it for me.
> My setup has never been so customized, because there is no friction now. I love it and I predict this will increase, even if slightly, the real user base of linux desktops.
You don't need to predict anything, because it already has. I've seen multiple real cases of this. People who normally would 1. try Linux 2. get stuck 3. revert back to Windows, yet now 1. try Linux 2. Claude solves their issue when they encounter it 3. They keep using Linux.
I never wanted to memorise trivia, like remembering flags on a certain cli command. That always felt so painful when I just wanted to do a thing
Never been a better time to Emacs
But on emacs I prefer the opencode integration. Everything is open, and mostly works better than in claude or codex.
After 25 years of writing code in vim, I've found myself managing a bunch of terminal sessions and trying to spot issues in pull requests.
I wouldn't have thought this could be the case and it took me actually embracing it before I was fully sold.
Maybe not a popular opinion but I really do believe...
- code quality as we previously understood will not be a thing in 3-5 years
- IDEs will face a very sharp decline in use
Code quality and IDEs aren't going anywhere, especially in complex enterprise systems. AI has improved a lot, but we're still far from a "forget about code" world.
> Code quality and IDEs aren't going anywhere, especially in complex enterprise systems.
Was code quality ever there in complex enterprise systems?
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I don't think we are. We will not be able to keep the peace with code production velocity and I anticipate that focus will be moved strongly to testing and validation
> code quality as we previously understood will not be a thing in 3-5 years
Idk - I feel like the exact same quality, maintainability, readability stuff that makes developers more effective at writing code manually also accelerates LLM driven development. It's just less immediately obvious that your codebase being a spaghetti mess is slowing down the LLM because you're not the one having to deal with it directly anymore.
LLMs also have the same tendency to just make the additive changes needed to build each feature - you need to prompt them to refactor first instead if it's going to be beneficial in the long run.
I've found that models have improved here significantly in past few months. They have the tendency to pile on ad-hoc solutions by default, but are capable of doing better architectural decisions too if asked.
A better design can be made somewhat default by AGENTS.md instructions, but they can still make a mess unless on a short leash.
After setting up a new computer recently I wanted to play around with nix. I would've never done that without LLMs. Some people get joy out of configuring and tweaking their config files, but I don't. Being able to just let the LLM deal with that is great.
> tasks I've previously done using CLI commands.
Great, now you perform those tasks more slowly, using up a lot more computing power, with your activities and possibly data recorded by some remote party of questionable repute.
He is using a lot less computing power where it counts, his own.
> lately I've found myself using codex (in terminal) for terminal tasks I've previously done by CLI commands.
This is the real "computer use". We will always need GUI-level interaction for proprietary apps and websites that aren't made available in machine-readable form, but everything else you do with a computer should just be mapped to simple CLI commands that are comparatively trivial for a text-based AI.
I think websites via DOM are gonna be quite easy for the models.
>terminal tasks I've previously done using CLI commands.
Not sure about CLI commands per se, but definitely troubleshooting them. Docker-compose files in particular..."here's the error, here's the compose, help" is just magic
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