Adam Pippert@AdamPippertApril 27, 2026
You absolutely can blend fruit via a file-based interface if your blender is accessible at /dev/blender01
I'm hoisting this out of the comments because this is an interesting, and open, question: do we mostly need new primitives to fully leverage the power of LLMs, or do we mostly need to just do a really good job wiring up the computing primitives that have stood the test of time?
The real answer is probably "both," at least partly because history suggests that we always end up layering new technologies on top previous substrates. We don't ever really write anything from scratch.
But I also think it's true that the impressive success of training coding agents to use bash and files is an important proof point, and worth thinking hard about.
Files are an abstraction. It doesn't matter what's in them and they don't just hold text. (That's important!) It doesn't matter how the data is actually stored, or if the it's stored at all. You can read from a "file" that is magicking the data into existence byte by byte. (That's important, too!) The idea is simply that there's a standard interface to read, write, and pipe data.
But this simplicity is powerful. These are good primitives. They're composable. For example, they're flexible enough to *actually drive hardware devices.*
Adam Pippert@AdamPippert@kwindla It works as far as having a folder full of papers representing something you bought works. The manual to my blender helps me operate my blender, but it is not my blender. I can make a blender in Blender with a file about blender, but I can’t blend fruit with it.