What I've found is I can get get the frontier models to generate bash scripts, perl one liners, etc that do exactly what I need at roughly the same quality as any other code it generates.
I'm a shell scripter at heart, the arcane stuff has always been a delight for me, so I've driven them to do some pretty complex stuff where previously I would have "copped out" and used python. I'd say the general adage of them being at the level of a very talent junior holds true.
It's the only language terrible enough to make the default behavior ignore undefined variables, commands, and execution errors, and happily continue executing whatever was produced by me smashing my hands on the keyboard, until the end of the file, while returning an exit code of 0, claiming complete success.
Perl (needs use strict)
Ancient VB/VBA/VB script
Original PHP (no idea about modern)
PowerShell
Old Windows/DOS batch
No. It does not. Just write good scripts and catch errors and handle them. That's the same more less with every language. And bash can be written in a way that it is sane and readable and maintainable. Just because you have seen a lot of junk in the language does not make the language bad per se. Sure there are a lot of languages "features" which are more then questionable but I want to rise again the point that it has its place and can be used in a good way.
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
...
I have analysed your idiomatic one-liner and propose adding the following 30 lines into the application Yes/Yes and always accept such idiocy/No
ESCAPE ESCAPE
/clear
I want to update my powershell skill so that it writes idiomatic pipelines and does not introduce idioms from other languages.
[PASTES overeagerness wording from Claude prompting best practices]
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.
You can use zsh as the default shell and still write your scripts for bash. Actually, it’s an advice I saw more than a couple of times. Otherwise you need to translate the bash-isms when you get bits of code from random places on the Internet.
Just put the right shebang (or ask Claude to do it). What’s the problem?
But maybe that's because I'm the sucker, and since PowerShell is more verbose it costs me more tokens than the terseness of Unix shells. Oh well.
The knowledge that Bash is awful and should be avoided as much as possible is surprisingly and disappointingly rare.
(...)
> especially in the age of LLMs
Funny way of putting it.
But I think you are right still :)