For a preview of what it'd be like, just tell your AI chat app that you'll run bash commands for it, and please change the app in your "current directory" to "sort the output before printing it", or some such request.
So, yes, it can work.
Context management, both within and across sessions, seems the bigger issue. Without the agent supporting this, you are at the mercy of the model compacting/purging the context as needed, in some generic fashion, as well as being smart enough to decide to create notes for itself tracking what it is doing, etc.
Apparently CC is 512K LOC, which seems massively bloated, but I do think that things like tools, skills, context management and subagents are all needed to effectively manage context and avoid the issues that might be anticipated by just telling the model it's got a bash tool, and go figure.
I just asked Claude, and apparently CC makes it's bash tool available on all platforms it runs on (Linux, macOS, Windows WSL, Git for Windows), and doesn't do platform-specifc filtering of bash commands, which would seem to make for some interesting incompatibilities - GNU utils (sed, grep, find) on Linux and Windows, but BSD variants on macOS.
Okay sure it’s technically more than just bash, but my own for-fun coding agent and pi-coding-agent work this way. The latter is quite useful. You can get surprisingly far with it.