alt Hacker NewsI found this useful.
This could be dinosaur mindset from 2022, but would it not make sense to prompt the LLM to create a bash script based on these instructions, so it could be more deterministic? Claude code is pretty reliable, but this is probably only one and a half nines at best.
As for safety, running this in a devcontainer[1][2] or as part of a CI system should be completely fine.
1. (conventional usage) https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers
2. (actual spec) https://containers.dev/
Thank you, and yes! That is what I already frequently do for quick automation tasks.
As you say, Claude is actually very good at writing shell scripts and using tools on-the-fly. But I know there is an AI-confidence factor involved for developers making the choice to leverage that.
For simple tasks (in practice) I already find you can often prompt the whole thing.
For tasks where you already have the other traditional scripts or building blocks, or where it is complex, then you might break it up.
Interestingly, you can intermix these approaches.
You can have runnable markdown that writes and runs scripts on the fly, mixed with running command line tools, and chained along with traditional tools in a bash script, and then call that script from a runnable markdown that passes in test results, or analyzes the code base and passes recommendations in.
The composability and ability to combine and embed code blocks and tool use within plain language is quite powerful. I’m still learning how to use this.
I’m glad it is already useful and thank you.