Linux was accidentally designed for agents

Linux was accidentally designed for agents(danieldelaney.net)

4 points by cryptophreak 37 days ago | 6 comments

al_borland 37 days ago |

If the operating system is building the agent in, they will give it access to various APIs needed to do stuff. Apple already did this with Siri on the iPhone before AI took off, they wanted users to be able to adjust settings via Siri. Microsoft has made pretty much everything possible with Powershell as well, which I’d expect to be in Copilot’s training data. Maybe it’s not as easy as modifying a text file, but if the AI is doing it, does it matter?

Maybe it’s more work for the OS vendor, but it will likely be more user friendly overall, without any setup… this is the typical trade off and one reason why the year of the Linux desktop always seems 5 years away.

panny 37 days ago |

Is it though? How did the agent learn to operate GNU+Linux? Man pages, or questions on forums, mailing lists, and wikis?

cryptophreak 37 days ago | |

How does the answer to that question relate to the article?

panny 37 days ago | | |

MacOS has quite excellent help docs built in. It also has all the "wiring" exposed via AppleScript for most applications.

I would suggest that the GNU+Linux command line is not accidentally designed well for agents, it is that agents are purposely designed to use command line. And there are far greater numbers of posts online about how to write a bash script to accomplish something with a command line than there are about similar tasks accomplished in AppleScript. The agents are designed for command lines, and they did not "learn" by using, they just "copy/paste with more steps" from the abundant chatter about the command line tools from the internet.

Maybe someone will write an agent in Java, instead of the sloppy JS that Claude Code is written in. Then you might get a cross-platform java.awt.Robot that can drive the UI. Maybe someone will write one in AppleScript and flex that scripting interface. Maybe someone will build one using a selenium driver for ChromeOS. Who knows.