Vicki Boykis: agents succeed on git, bash, grep because these primitives were built well
vboykis · x · 2026-09-26
Vicki Boykis cites her 2022 essay "Git, SQL, CLI" to explain why agents built on primitives like git, bash, and grep succeed: someone thought hard about making them good. Drawing on experience across 6+ companies, she lays out criteria for foundational tools — durable, environment-agnostic, foundational — and argues SQL should be learned first, since nearly every data tool (Hive, Kafka) converges to SQL.
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