Post #3549619
2026-07-02 16:49 UTC
[this is eventually a post about AI tooling]
Reading @judell@social.coop 's latest post https://blog.jonudell.net/2026/07/01/what-is-the-terminal/ made me realize that the Unix toolset is like a CISC processor with lots of overlap between instructions (think about how many ways you can do regular expression substitution from the command line) rather than like a modern RISC processor (smaller single-purpose instructions, which means you need more to accomplish any given task, but the net result is more efficient). 1/
Replies (1)
-
@gvwilson@mastodon.social 2026-07-02 16:52
Today, LLMs are spitting out shell commands that use all the available tools, because that's what their training data does. I wonder how long it will be until we see a new, more cohesive set of command-line tools that truly follow the Unix philosophy: each does exactly one thing, RISC-style, and the power comes from ever-greater composition. That, plus the "everything is structured data" philosophy of Nushell, would be an interesting future (albeit unlikely). 2/