alt Hacker NewsI feel like these abstractions like "CI might not work well in the era of agentic tooling" are fine for thought-leadership posts but there's so much hands-on work to be done. The last word on AI computer use shouldn't be bash utils that were already feature-complete before MJ recorded Thriller.
There is some movement in this direction--there is a new 'gh' subcommand called repo read-file for example, that lets agents view a file without cloning a repo. And I made something called venetianblinds that shows equidistant samples of a file. In combo they work pretty well:
gh repo read-file sqlite3.c --repo clibs/sqlite --output sqlite3.c && npx github:firasd/venetianblinds sqlite3.c
--- sample 2/20 char 283427 line 5855 col 53 range 283367:283487
le].
**
** ^Closing a BLOB shall cause the current transaction to commit
** if there are no other BLOBs, no pending prep
^Replies
Hand-crafted, domain-specific tools massively outperform general purpose ones.
Shell execution and raw DOM access are great for a backstop, but you can go so much further with just a little bit of translation and delegation around the environment.
I think browser automation is probably the most apt scenario. Often a human who understands how a page is meant to be perceived can transform a megabyte of raw web content down to a few hundred bytes of plaintext without any reduction in fidelity. This can be achieved using deterministic code that is guaranteed to provide a perfect transform every time.
The performance difference between raw DOM access and curated plaintext is like a step function. With raw access you get maybe 10-15 steps into a complex workflow before the wheels pop off. With curated access I've seen it go 100+ screens without issues.
Simply managing the token bloat is probably the most important objective here. If that's all you focus on it will probably go really well.
MCP is the answer to not using bash, right?
Bash is a great control surface anyway for LLMs as it is wordy and powerful.
I've found the process of building good reliable CI that thoroughly covers everything has been greatly improved by LLMs. There's so much tedious plumbing and grunt work involved in building CI and automated testing infrastructure for bespoke products that they can handle just fine while you concentrate on the important bits - I would say it's an area where agentic workflows are even more suited than regular product code.