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Comment by crooked-v

6 hours ago

For me, step 1 of trying to make Claude even vaguely usable is putting in a hook that just tells it 'FUCK YOU, STOP USING PIPES' whenever it tries to chain multiple bash commands.

Keep in mind that this likely destroys context and makes your costs go up considerably.

An agent often wants pipes so that it can `show_lots_of_logs | sed ...` and only see the part related to whatever error it's currently trying to debug. Without pipes, it has to take that entire log into the context. An agent without pipes is like a human without the ability to scroll.

  • I guess ideally you'd want to force it to pipe each step back into the agent/IDE for display (and optionally wait for approval) rather than shoving it into the context. And with some sort of heuristic to skip commands that are piped into sed and similar.

    or use just use actual files instead of pipes with a permissions dialogue gate on write. That would work already in Claude I think, and with IDE integration it would show each step as it went.

    Of course buffering every step of a pipeline will have its own side-effects.