Lessons You Learn Writing Shell Scripts by Hand

Humans are able to adapt to new situations not in history books nor databases.

I'll keep those skills. I think we can all share stories of canned solutions that worked except in the corner cases we ran into, or in my case, a team member who only knew GUI tools, so he would create overlapping disk partitions, which I had to entirely redo with the CLI.

I don't place faith in something whose internals are entirely opaque and which has a record of failures. Even if I looked at only a few examples of Unix command source code, I knew that others did, and didn't have to run regression tests on them.

I've been getting a little heartbroken seeing some of the "replace every tool with AI" enthusiasm on social media, so I wrote up two simple lessons I learned because I write stuff by hand.

I realise everyone's welcome to their own toolchain; LLMs are fine. I just want to write about the kind of thing I value, and how it helps me to connect to the broader Unix community.