| > Well, there it is, the dumbest thing I'll read on the internet all week. Rude. In case you're open to learning, here's why I think this is useful. The big lesson we've learned from Claude Code, Codex CLI et al over the past twelve months is that the most useful tool you can provide to an LLM is Bash. Last year there was enormous buzz around MCP - Model Context Protocol. The idea was to provide a standard for wiring tools into LLMs, then thousands of such tools could bloom. Claude Code demonstrated that a single tool - Bash - is actually much more interesting than dozens of specialized tools. Want to edit files without rewriting the whole thing every time? Tell the agent to use sed or perl -e or python -c. Look at the whole Skills idea. The way Skills work is you tell the LLM "if you need to create an Excel spreadsheet, go read this markdown file first and it will tell you how to run some extra scripts for Excel generation in the same folder". Example here: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/skills/xlsx That only works if you have a filesystem and Bash style tools for navigating it and reading and executing the files. This is why I want Linux in WebAssembly. I'd like to be able to build LLM systems that can edit files, execute skills and generally do useful things without needing an entire locked down VM in cloud hosting somewhere just to run that application. Here's an alternative swipe at this problem: Vercel have been reimplementing Bash and dozens of other common Unix tools in TypeScript purely to have an environment agents know how to use: https://github.com/vercel-labs/just-bash I'd rather run a 10MB WASM bundle with a full existing Linux build in then reimplement it all in TypeScript, personally. |
It sounds like what you're really trying to recreate is the Software Tools movement from 50 years ago, where there was a push to port the UNIX/BTL utilities to the widest possible variety of systems to establish a common programming and data manipulation environment. It was arguably successful in getting good ports available just about anywhere, evolving into GNU, etc., but it never really reached its apotheosis. That style of clear, easy-to-read-and-write software was still largely killed off by a few big industry players pushing a narrative that "enterprise" has to mean relational databases and distributed objects. It would be FASCINATING if AI coding agents are the force that brings it back.