Progress
from wannabe neckbeard to wannabe meat proxy
oldheads like me remember curating 20-50 lines in a .aliases file, which we would maybe print out or otherwise copy over to different Unix machines on which we had accounts.
ls becomes ls -alF
more is less or was it the other way around
I never memorized how to do subdirectory text searches, but had a fancy pattern for find which traversed subdirectories with fgrep
It wasn't all wizardry, alchemy, magic spell kind of stuff. My sentimental favorite was a series of f1, f2, f3, ... fn which would finger my terminally online friends depending how immediately I needed to know about them updating their .plan file. A proto-facebook text-based social network, that overlapped with real life classes and campus jobs, email lists, newsgroups, AIM status, etc.
now, with AI, there is absolutely zero point in spending any brain cycles on CLI syntactic sugar
nor for things like shell scripting syntax, idiosyncracies of Bourne vs bash vs csh vs tcsh and the like, which used to fill my ever-loving brain
my sed and awk knowledge are no longer useful. Bye-bye, headspace for crontab formatting rules
Today, I told my agent to download and install a machine-learning framework I had never heard of, which it suggested was better than either jev or GLiNER so idk idc yolo ig. It told me all the choices it needed from me, I tried to make good decisions, and it even let me watch as it encountered obstacles and solved them.
Yay