I have a standing instruction telling the agents to prefer to use ruby wherever possible. Ruby uses fewer tokens than Bash and is easier to read, especially when condensed into a single line.

Of course, that only helps if you’re familiar with ruby. And the agents sometimes still choose Bash regardless of the instruction.

> Recent GPT and Claude models have this tendency of using super complex Bash commands. This makes sense, if your RL rewards optimize for min(tokens) and max(performance), it is better to waste a few tokens on a complex inline Bash script that runs a few commands at a time and returns just the output you need, rather than doing one simple command per turn and paying the cache read on every turn, like older models used to do.

This is not a good reason. Models can emit batched tool calls, which a smart harness will process all at once without starting a new turn. I see it in Zed all the time. In fact, Zed processes batched tool calls concurrently, which can be faster than a chain of Bash commands, and failure of one part does not cause failure of subsequent parts chained with `&&`. This approach is token neutral and easier to understand.

I was in this boat also when my company didn't allow auto-approval. Bash and python scripts are a pain to revieve.

Though I think this is largely transitory, we are already in a place with the harnesses and models like Opus 5.5 that the kinds of work you are doing involve so much that vetting everything manually is probably less efficient than setup up access control on the prod routes or dangerous resources.

I'm typically giving tasks that invlude multiple actual repositories and systems at the same time.

I think 2024's method of manually reviewing bash commands is unsuitable for modern agentic development. Whether that's something they want to optimize Claude Code for is their call.

That said, I've also seen problems from complicated bash calls with Opus 5.5 on xhigh. Occasionally git push hangs and it believes it's waiting for an hour for git hooks.

The actual reason apparently was that it incorrectly piped git into grep, resulting in a deadlocked command.

> Recent GPT and Claude models have this tendency of using super complex Bash commands.

Are you sure? I read its proposed commands (auto mode is hard off for me), and mostly it seems to string together fairly simple info gathering commands (ie grep's, echo's, that kind of thing).

I don't tend to have it write much code recently though, instead I'm having it investigate config files/code bases, and that kind of stuff.