alt Hacker News> The harness instructs them to behave this way. Also this approach saves tokens. The scripts allow to edit files in bulk, and most of the session cost is in cache reads (e.g. for 300K context each command costs the same as 30K input tokens).
I understand the reasoning, but at that point wouldn't the LLM be better off creating `sed` commands and executing those? I mean, if it's already executing Python, it can literally do anything to the environment, so using `sed` is at least as safe, with a bonus that it (or a subagent, or a human) can double-check the intention with the sed script and flag incorrect or missing changes.
I've experimented quite a bit with giving agents python vs sed + awk. They make mistakes with both, a lot. The only thing that has stood out is that agents reach for python too quickly if it's available, and that awk causes the least problems, while sed might take several attempts to get results, similar to python.