Frontier models are superhuman in Bash — I deleted every other tool and nothing broke
_philschmid · x · 2026-09-01
Philipp Schmid shares a hands-on finding: coding agents increasingly prefer Bash over dedicated read/edit/search tools.
Every few months he rebuilds an agent harness from scratch to see what changed and what can be deleted. This time he removed every model-facing tool except Bash and a media viewer. Task completion stayed in the same range while the agent moved through complex work and verification with fewer tool boundaries.
Frontier models are now superhuman in Bash in a narrow sense: they synthesize disposable command-line programs in seconds that most developers would need much longer to assemble.
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