Love their network filtering, however it definitely lacks some capabilities (like the ability to do direct TCP connections to Postgres, or direct IP connections.
Look again at the xkcd comic (I did before posting the comment). The sandwich-making person is not obviously female, in fact he(?) looks rather male according to xkcd convention.
Giving agents linux has compounding benefits in our experience. They're able to sort through weirdness that normal tooling wouldn't allow. Like they can read and image, get an error back from the API and see it wasn't the expected format. They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.
Matches my experience with print-on-demand workflows. I tried using vision models to validate things like ICC profiles and total ink density, but they usually just hallucinate that the file is compliant. I ended up giving the agent access to ImageMagick to run analysis directly. It’s the only reliable way to catch issues before sending files to fulfillment, otherwise you end up eating the cost of failed prints.
> They read the magic bytes to see it was a jpeg despite being named .png, and read it correctly.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems trivial to implement reading the magic bytes. I haven't tested it, but I'd expect most linux image displayers/editors to automatically work with misnamed files as that is almost entirely the purpose of magic bytes.
Personally, I think Microsoft is to blame for everyone relying on file extensions too much as it was a bad idea which led to a lot of security issues.
I don't understand why this is something special that somebody would need some LLM slop generation for? Any human can also do this in a few seconds using normal unix tooling.
That's like saying 'why give people calculators, when you can pull out a slide rule'
The whole point is that you are enabling the LLM through tool use. The prompt might be "Download all the images on the wikipedia article for 'Ascetic', and print them on my dot matrix printer (the driver of which only accepts BMPs, so convert as needed)"
Your solution using file / curl is just one part of the potential higher level problem statement. Yes, someone could write those lines easily. And they could write the wrapper around them with only a little more difficulty. And they could add the 404 logic detection with a bit more...
Are you arguing LLMs should only be used on 'hard' problems, and 'easy' problems (such as downloading with curl) should be done by humans? Or are you arguing LLMs should not be used for anything?
Because I think most people would suggest humans tackle the 'hard' problems, and let the tools (LLMs) tackle the 'easy' ones.
I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!
If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?
I disagree, in my opinion it's the exact same process, just on a much smaller scale. It's a problem, and we humans are good at solving problems. That is, until LLMs arrived, now we are supposed to become good at prompting, or something.
Much as I love kākāpō there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that.
I love this new world where I can "delegate my thinking" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I would otherwise be unable to do so because I didn't have the time to figure it out.
(I published it as a looping MP4 because that was smaller than the GIF, another thing I didn't have to figure out how to do myself.)
Yes but now do the same for every bit of programming tooling, sysadmin configuration / debugging problem and concept out there. With just a few seconds to answer each reply.
Well LLMs do make normal Linux tooling more accessible. I needed a video reformatted to a new aspect ratio and codec and Claude produced a rather complex set of arguments for ffmpeg that I hadn’t been able to figure out on my own.
I think this is missing the point, These are tools that enable the LLM to do things that humans can do easily.
It stops an LLM from being blocked by the inability to do this thing. Removing this barrier might enable the LLM to complete a task that would be considerable work for a human.
For instance, identifying which files are PNG files containing pictures of birds, regardless of filename, presence or absence of suffix. An image handling LLM can identify if an image is of a bird much more easily than it could determine that an arbitrary file is a png. They can probably still do it, wasting a lot of tokens along the way, but using a few commands to determine which files to even bother looking at as images means the LLM can do what it is good at.
No the fuck we wont
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