Reimagining Bash for Untrusted Contexts
Bash is designed for humans and it should stay that way. When I talk about untrusted contexts, I mean automated processes and AI agents. Both scenarios come to the same conclusion: they are trying to act like humans, but in reality, they don't have the same constraints.
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Reimagining Bash for untrusted contextsApril 28, 2026Bash is designed for humans and it should stay that way. When I talk about untrusted contexts, I mean automated processes and AI agents. Both scenarios come to the same conclusion: they are trying to act like humans, but in reality, they don't have the same constraints. As humans, we don't constantly need textual feedback to reach our goals. We have other concerns like efficiency, developer experience (including visual comfort and ergonomics), concerns that agents don't share. Bash delivers this experience perfectly for us, but not for untrusted processes. Same syntax, different output Since agents are trained on human data, they know how to use Bash by default. However, it doesn't mean that Bash's output is made for them.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Github.