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LLMs are proof that Unix won

32 pointsby Pseudomanifoldtoday at 3:59 PM9 commentsview on HN

Comments

datakantoday at 6:29 PM

> 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

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Chinjuttoday at 6:50 PM

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".)

drak0n1ctoday at 6:41 PM

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

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pjmlptoday at 5:54 PM

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.

vessenestoday at 6:22 PM

s/Unix/The CLI/

But yes. That’s true.

justsomehnguytoday at 6:27 PM

> Many of the command-line tools I use have been around for quite some time now1 but they still work admirably and allow me to do things like this:2

> [...]

> If this reads like gibberish to you, my younger hothead self, full of (neo)vim and vigor, would have hit you with the old “Linux is very user-friendly; it’s just also super picky about its friends.” Yes, younger me was adept at making enemies like a craftsman

No, it reads like you are an entitled fanboi and need to touch gra^W^W talk with a real human beings outside your small citrcle of nerds. Even better - to work a couple of weeks with your own hands and your own back. That helps.