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lucumo • today at 9:53 AM • 3 replies • view on HN

> Then a brick hits you in the face when it dawns on you that all of our tools are dumping crazy amounts of non-relevant context into stdout thereby polluting your context windows.

Not just context windows. Lots of that crap is completely useless for humans too. It's not a rare occurrence for warnings to be hidden in so much irrelevant output that they're there for years before someone notices.

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jaggederest • today at 11:22 AM

The old unix philosophy of "print nothing on success" looks crazy until you start trying to build pipes and shell scripts that use multiple tools internally. Also very quickly makes it clear why stdout and stderr are separate

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kubanczyk • today at 11:37 AM

Yeah. Maybe we only need:

   BATCH=yes    (default is no)

   --batch   (default is --no-batch)
for the unusual case when you do want the `route print` on a BGP router to actually dump 8 gigabytes of text throughout next 2 minutes. Maybe it's fine if a default output for anything generously applies summarization, such as "X, Y, Z ...and 9 thousand+ similar entries".

Having two separate command names (one for human/llm, one for batch) sucks.

Having `-h` for human, like ls or df do, sucks slightly less, but it is still a backward-compatibility hack which leads to `alias` proliferation and makes human lifes worse.