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genidoitoday at 6:47 AM3 repliesview on HN

I find LLM's too fall into the trap of writing a bash script for a task that clearly needs to be implemented in an Actual Language with Real Data Structures. For example, ask an LLM to bring up a SQL server with some schema + data preload step, and it will write a profoundly long bash script to do that task, every time.


Replies

csydastoday at 7:27 AM

my experience as well. claude produces functional but over-engineered scripts fairly frequently with often very questionably useful safety checks, especially for powershell.

a common tell of ai generated powershell is a script that has dedicated functions to check types, often via several methods, and happily prints the output of the checks to shell. i do not get why it does this but it often adds dozens of lines that really serve no purpose but to make the shell output look fancy

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Grimburgertoday at 7:48 AM

Try being on linux and using zsh, it constantly fucks up scripts. Having it run commands via SSH into a windows machine is even more a comedy of errors.

I have to put in every claude.md that the shell is zsh. It's reached the point of annoyance I might just go back to bash.

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IshKebabtoday at 7:22 AM

I think they've learnt from decades of humans using Bash for tasks that clearly need to be implemented in an Actual Language.

The knowledge that Bash is awful and should be avoided as much as possible is surprisingly and disappointingly rare.