Claude killed my CLI
As a devoted Linux user, an inveterate config-tweaker, and a hopeless unixporn enthusiast, I follow a lot of subreddits on related topics. In particular /r/linux and /r/commandline. I love digging through and finding new little hacks or handy one-liners or helpful little tools that I've never heard of. It's one of the major ways I unwind after a long day herding servers for pay. Shaving a few keystrokes off of some process that I do regularly gives me a little thrill. I hit on a similar topic a few days ago. So, granted it is a waste of time and really only valuable for me but since when do hobbies have to have some deeper value?
Lately, however, the volume of posts has shot up dramatically but the quality of those posts has declined just as dramatically. The number of new programs popping up on open-source adjacent places is truly incredible. Unfortunately, it seems like the vast majority of them are prime examples of the XY Problem. The XY problem is one of the commonest problems found with new developers but I think Claude is making it worse.
The description of the XY problem from xyproblem.info is relatively clear so I crib it here.
- User wants to do X.
- User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
- User doesn't know how to do Y either.
- User asks for help with Y.
- Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
- After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X.
The case here is even more pathological, though. The user never even finds out about Y. They walk away thinking that X was the real problem all along. Because the AI just wants to do exactly what the user asks, it never notices that the question itself is poorly posed. Thus, open-source adjacent forums are buried under an endless torrent of poorly thought out solutions to the wrong problem which are usually abandoned immediately after the blog post announcing the tool. Increasingly, these developers are removing all their prompts and self committing to hide the Claude commits so that it's more difficult to tell it was all vibe coded. The only real tell in a lot of cases is the volume of code produced per day.
I know this will die down eventually. I also know that, mixed in with the chaff, there are some really good tools in there. In the meantime, though, it's really killing my nerdy hobby and polluting my RSS feeds.