Agentic AI Might Make Bash Immortal
Good old futuristic Bash.
I've been playing with agents and agentic coding a lot recently.
One thing I kept noticing, from the tool calls - it was Bash.
All the way down.
That... piqued my curiosity.
I had a phase where I moved all my scripts from Bash to Python. (Which is a language I really love.)
Throughout that period, I read decades' worth of arguments predicting that Bash would die. That Bash was living on borrowed time.
Eventually though, I came back to my senses. And to Bash.
Because - outside of things where I actually need the fancier side of dynamic Python - there was just something about Bash. No, I'm not romantic about software. But:
Bash feels and has always felt natural when it came to my idea of how computers should operate.
My shell is already connected to almost everything anyway. Through Bash, I can invoke Git, Python, SQLite, ffmpeg, Typst, Docker, SSH, compilers, network tools, and thousands of ordinary Unix programs. I can pipe and combine them.
I can control virtually all my machines, just from the terminal.
And now, with the agentic stuff, I kinda realize: for AIs, Bash is almost ideal.
Compare clicking through folders and menus, vs typing:
find . -name "_.pdf"
rg "limitation" .
git diff
pytest
python extract.py judgment.pdf
The above is easier for computers.
'Ugliness' is relative. Bash is not ugly or intimidating to a machine. Bash is compact, deterministic, scriptable, inspectable, universal. Everything humans (might) dislike about Bash are kind of irrelevant to AI.
And therefore:
A technology from the 1970s and 1980s may end up becoming part of the nervous system of twenty-first-century AI.
Rather than Bash being replaced by AI, AI may actually become one of the strongest reasons Bash never dies.
...Which means that Bash might ultimately win the longevity contest.
So after 50 years of increasingly elaborate GUIs, we may only now realize how we accidentally built the ideal AI-computer interface back then, in the 1970s.
The irony is almost perfect. Hmm.