MCP is the answer to not using bash, right?

Bash is a great control surface anyway for LLMs as it is wordy and powerful.

Yeah as far as what I'm talking about bash CLI vs MCP doesn't matter (there could be a file_sample MCP tool)---I'm saying that by default Windows, Linux etc don't have this venetianblinds affordance of seeing equally spaced samples. It's a trivial algo but it's very handy these days cause LLMs can't really just be like 'okay I'm gonna open this file at random and scroll around'--the file itself is an unknown blob (JSON data, Python, Typescript, a log file etc) without coordinates. So they fall back to thinking they've gotten a good sense of the file from head/grep or they write ad-hoc Python to manipulate the file.

Another venetianblinds survey, of the Paul Graham 'What I Worked On' article that's used in many LlamaIndex examples:

npx github:firasd/venetianblinds pgworkedon.txt

  --- sample 1/20 char 0 line 1 col 1 range 0:60
  Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of s

  --- sample 2/20 char 3946 line 19 col 237 range 3886:4006
  d an intelligent computer called Mike, and a PBS documentary that showed Terry Winograd using SHRDLU. I haven't tried re

Also, this is a trivial example but I would rather an LLm call a recursive "grep" than using 1000 read_file MCP calls.

Having a scripting language as a tool is powerfull, and can help remove unnecessary stuff from the LLM's context.

Problem is that bash is too sharp to handle to smart and gullible clankers without a sandbox - That I think everyone should be using anyways, for everything, even things not related to clankers - Android and Qubes are right. The app/vm, and whatever it tries, should not be considered trusted by default.