My long running joke is that the actual good `jq` is just the LLM interface that generates `jq` queries; 'simonw actually went and built that.

https://github.com/simonw/llm-jq for those following along at home

https://github.com/simonw/llm-cmd is what i use as the "actually good ffmpeg etc front end"

and just to toot my own horn, I hand Simon's `llm` command lone tool access to its own todo list and read/write access to the cwd with my own tools, https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-todo and https://github.com/dannyob/llm-tools-patch

Even with just these and no shell access it can get a lot done, because these tools encode the fundamental tricks of Claude Code ( I have `llmw` aliased to `llm --tool Patch --tool Todo --cl 0` so it will have access to these tools and can act in a loop, as Simon defines an agent. )

Tried gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) a bit? If you know your UNIX, I think it can replace jq in a lot of cases. And when it can't, well, you can reach for Python, I guess.

It's highly plausible that all we assumed was good design / engineering will disappear if LLMs/Agents can produce more without having the be modular. (sadly)

There is some kind of parallel behind 'AI' and 'Fuzzy Logic'. Fuzzy logic to me always appeared like a large number of patches to get enough coverage for a system to work even if you didn't understand it. AI just increases the number of patches to billions.

true, there's often a point where your system becomes a blurry miracle