Why does AI tell you to use Terminal so much?

Sure, GUI is more accessible to the average users, but all the tasks in the article aren't going to be done by the average user. And for the more technical users, having to navigate System Settings to find anything is like Dr. Sattler plunging her arms into a pile of dinosaur dung.

In any case, being technical myself I actually like that LLMs give me command line commands.

Those are unambiguous, composable and much easier to check what they do, but for muggles, yeah, they could be dangerous.

As noted, terminal commands can be ridiculously powerful, and can result in messy states.

The last time I asked an LLM for help, was when I wanted to move an automounted disk image from the internal disk to an external one. If you do that, when the mount occurs, is important.

It gave me a bunch of really crazy (and ineffective) instructions, to create login items with timed bash commands, etc. To be fair, I did try to give it the benefit of the doubt, but each time its advice pooched, it would give even worse workarounds.

One of the insidious things, was that it never instructed to revert the previous attempt, like most online instruction posts. This resulted in one attempt colliding with the previous ineffective one, when I neglected to do so, on my own judgment.

Eventually, I decided the fox wasn’t worth the chase, and just left the image on the startup disk. It wasn’t that big, anyway. I made sure to remove all the litter from the LLM debacle.

Taught me a lesson.

> “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.“

-Mark Twain

UIs have better visual feedback for "Am I about to do the right thing?".

But with the AI, there's a good chance it has it correct, and a good chance it'll just be copy/pasted or even run directly. So the risk is reduced.

Since it's all statistics under the LLM hood, both of those cause proven CLI tools to have strong signals as being the right answer.

This further solidifies my view that LLMs will not achieve AGI by refuting the oft repeated popsci argument that human brains predict the next word in a sentence just like LLMs.

It won’t be as fast to go through them than just pasting some commands but if that’s what the user prefers…

edit: ChatGPT talked me recently through Linux Mint installation on two old laptops I have at home where Mint didn't detect existing Windows installation (which I wanted to keep), don't think anyone on Reddit or elsewhere would be as fast/patient as ChatGPT, it was mostly done by terminal commands, one computer was easy, the other had already 4 partitions and FAT32, so it took longer

It would be nice if this was mentioned transparently in the beginning of article.

I mean - new models also tell you to use the terminal, but the quality is incomparable to what the author is using.

However had, I use the terminal all the time. It is the primary user interface to me to get computers to do what I want; in the most basic sense I simply invoke various commands from the commandline, often delegating onto self-written ruby scripts. For instance "delem" is my commandline alias for delete_empty_files (kept in delete_empty_files.rb). I have tons of similar "actions"; oldschool UNIX people may use some commandline flags for this. I also support commandline flags, of course, but my brain works best when I keep everything super-simple at all times. So I actually do not disagree with AI here; the terminal is efficient. I just don't need AI to tell me that - I knew that before already. So AI may still be stupid. It's like a young over-eager kid, but without a real ability to "learn".

Am I the only one who thinks like this?

By "few" you mean "few Gen-Zs?"