Seems like 80% of agent use boils down to: grep | sed -i

Which is kind of cool if you’re unaware enough to know to do it yourself.

Oh, and find. Agents use find a lot.

So it turns out that a lot of these unix utilities have such bad UX that having a tool that knows how to really leverage them feels like a superpower.

If you've ever used an LLM to deal with ffmpeg you'll know exactly what I mean.

I would rather bet that people don’t know that their problem has been solved for ages. Either they don’t know about the tools or can’t make the leap to think of using something like awk or sed to quickly script out their use cases. Or even quickly draft up a quick function/plugin in something like vim, emacs, sublime,…

In “The Pragmatic Programmer”, the power of unix tools and editor fluency is well argued. There are plenty of other books like “Unix Power Tools”, “Small, Sharp Software Tools”,…

My problem is always the time necessary to get good at the tool is slightly more than just brute forcing it one more time.

I'm not always forced for time. And the time is slightly less when you know how to use man (with apropos and whatis, a few unix conventions (null vs newline when piping text) and the quirks/feature of your shell.

It is incredibly difficult to make an UX that can beat simply typing what you need in your own words.

You think of what you need, and you type it. No need to even ask “what options should I use?”

Pi even installs ripgrep and fd if it can't find them in the path.

Yeah, I've actually found in my own testing and usage of LLMs that this is where I get a lot of benefit. I already have fd, ripgrep, etc. installed and know how to use them, but it's not hard to tell the LLM to do it and it often finds things just as well. Or even better.

It's especially handy on modern style code where things get broken up across a multitude of files based on convention.