When we run autonomous agents across different environments (Vercel functions, local dev, CI containers, remote VMs), Python availability is a negotiation. Bash is given. The agent doesn't need to worry about whether venv is activated, which Python version is installed, or whether a package needs to be pip-installed first.

There's also a subtler benefit: bash commands have predictable, well-documented side effects. When an agent runs `git commit -m "..."` it knows exactly what happened. When it runs a Python script that does the same thing via subprocess, there's now an abstraction layer to reason about.

The performance concern is real for I/O-heavy tasks. But for orchestration -- "list files, check git status, curl an API, write a line to a log" -- bash overhead is negligible and the interoperability wins dominate.

The place where this breaks down is anything requiring complex data transformation or error handling with multiple failure modes. That's where we drop into Python. The architecture that works for us: bash for the orchestration layer (run this, check that, pipe here), Python for anything with real logic.

I wonder the reason.

Maybe 'do one thing well'? The piping? The fact that the tools have been around so long so there are so many examples in the training data? Simplicity? All of it?

The success of this project depends on the answer.

Even so, I suspect that something like this will be a far too leaky abstraction.

But Vercel must try because they see the writing on the wall.

No one needs expensive cloud platforms anymore.

Bash has been unchanged for decades but its not a very nice language.

I know pydantic has been experimenting with https://github.com/pydantic/monty (restricted python) and I think Cloudflare and co were experimenting with giving typescript to agents.

Check it out here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@archildata/just-bash

  We built Execwall [1] to sit between the agent and the OS, enforcing argument-level policies. So you can allow git clone but deny git push, or allow chmod 644 but block chmod 777. Works with any shell or execution method.

  The key insight is that "restricted subsets" of languages still need policy enforcement at runtime - an agent can construct dangerous commands dynamically even in a sandboxed language.

  [1] https://github.com/sundarsub/execwall

https://github.com/jeffchuber/just-bash-openfs

it puts a bash interface in front of s3, filesystem (real and in-memory), postgres, and chroma.

still very much alpha - but curious what people think about it.

see an example app here: https://github.com/jeffchuber/openfs-incident-app

I'm not going for compatibility, but something that is a bit hackable. Deliberately not having /lib /share and /etc to avoid confusion that it might be posix

On neocoties for proof of static hosting

https://lerc.neocities.org

That's a lot of incompatibilities.

LLMs like to use the shell because it's stable and virtually unchanged for decades.

It doesn't need to worry much about versions or whether something is supported or not, it can just assume it is.

Re-implementing bash is a herculean effort. I wish good luck.