LLMs are proof that Unix won

pjmlp

My Java, .NET, Go, JavaScript/Typescript code running on serverless deployments, or low code/no code agentic tools, don't care what OS is powering the underlying type 1 hypervisor running their containers.

vessenes

s/Unix/The CLI/ But yes. That’s true.

datakan

> In that sense, LLMs are embodying the Unix philosophy. Of course, this analogy has holes so big you can easily ride a horse through. LLMs are neither small nor do they do one thing—you could even argue that some of the things they do, they certainly do not do well. So the title is just clickbait

drak0n1c

Not only are LLMs perfectly equipped for command-line interfaces, Linux is also the most performant OS for hosting the models locally.

Chinjut

People love to say the Unix philosophy is "Write programs that do one thing and do it well". But this does not really seem to me to really match Unix practice. And it doesn't match LLMs either, as the article notes. (So what is this article talking about? I guess it's talking mainly about "Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface".)

zahrevsky

> Presenting at first nothing but an input box to the user, they constituted a deliberate break in habits for many No, users were used to it because that's how Google works.

kazinator

Every Unix tool does four-and-a-half things: - parse command line arguments in a slightly different way from other tools - parse some ad hoc input format specific to itself - do one or more actual jobs - produce output in its own ad hoc format - produces a termination status; here there can be variations: tools written "void main" that return a nondeterministic status; tools that use multiple nonzero codes for multiple interesting non-success conditions. This messy way of doing things has "won" in AI ecosystems, I suppose.