Since the article has been changed to tone down its provocative opener, which clearly had a kicking-the-anthill effect, I'm moving those original reactions to this subthread.
>Installing software is a task which should be left to AI.
I think the subtext here is actually revealing a deeper issue. Installing software sucks. It’s error prone and every project does it a slightly different way. What we need is standardization, and I can see why prose could be an attractive middle ground. Easier to understand but less precise may result in marginally better outcomes.
I’m concerned that this approach serves to fix the obvious problems while simultaneously introducing subtler problems.
Tangentially, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. There are projects like nix that are excellent at fixing a lot of problems in the software packaging and installation space that are great from a security perspective but are famously difficult to use. I’d personally like to see more work leveraging AI to increase the accessibility of these paradigms and not throw the bathwater out with the baby, so to speak.
Appropriately, I think this was probably drafted by AI too:
> How does install.md work with my existing CLI or scripts?
> install.md doesn't replace your existing tools—it works with them. Your install.md can instruct the LLM to run your CLI, execute your scripts, or follow your existing setup process. Think of it as a layer that guides the LLM to use whatever tools you've already built.
(It doesn't X — it Ys. Think of it as a Z that Ws. this is LLM speak! I don't know why they lean on these constructions to the exclusion of all else, but they demonstrably do. The repo README was also committed by Claude Code. As much as I like some of the code that Claude produces, its Readmes suck)
Yeah, removing that line right now. Went too fast and some this copy is definitely low quality :(. Incredibly ironic for me to say that AI needs more supervision while working at the company proposing this haha.
Any other feedback you have about the general idea?
I think my preferred version of this would be a hybrid. Keep the regular installer, add a file filled with information that an LLM can use to assist a human if the install script fails for some reason.
If the installer was going to succeed in a particular environment anyway, you definitely want to use that instead of an LLM that might sporadically fail for no good reason in that same environment.
If the installer fails then you have a "knowledge base" to help debug it, usable by humans or LLMs, and if it fails, well, the regular installer failed too, so hopefully you're not worse off. If the user runs the helper LLM in yolo mode then the consequences are on them.
fascinating. i personally (biased bc i work at Mintlify) think a markdown file makes more sense than a bash script because at least Claude kind of has your best interests at heart.
>i personally (biased bc i work at Mintlify) think a markdown file makes more sense than a bash script because at least Claude kind of has your best interests at heart.
Most of the largest trends in "how to deploy software" revolve around making things predictable and consistent. The idea of abandoning this in favor of making a LLM do the work seems absurd. At least the bash script can be replicated exactly across machines and will do the same thing in the same situation.
Yeah, I'm going to add that as one of the downsides to the docs. The stochastic nature of the markdown vs. a script is for sure a reason to not adopt this.
Wait, but being serious. You can prompt the ai when you feed it this file to ask "do you see anything nefarious" or "follow these instructions, but make sure you ask me every time you install something because i want to check the safety" in a way that you can't when you pipe a script into bash.
Does that make any sense or am I just off my rocker?
No. Absolutely not. The opposite in fact. Your bash script is deterministic. You can send it to 20 AIs or have someone fluent read it. Then you can be confident it’s safe.
An LLM will run the probabilistically likely command each time. This is like using Excel’s ridiculous feature to have a cell be populated by copilot rather than having the AI generate a deterministic formula.
I would think that the common bash scripts we already have would provide an agent better context for installation than a markdown file, and even better, they already work without an LLM.
I can definitely see where you're coming from and agree to a large extent. I was asking myself that question a lot when thinking about this.
What pushed me over the edge was actually feeding bash install scripts into agents and seeing them not perform well. It does work, but a lot worse than this install.md thing.
In the docs for the proposal I wrote the following:
>install.md files are direct commands, not just documentation. The format is structured to trigger immediate autonomous execution.[1]
All the insecurity of running a random bash script, with all the terrifying stochasticity of an LLM in one "makes you want to tear your eyes out" package!
Fascinating. My thinking was that this is an upgrade over a bash script because you can prompt the AI to check it, clear installs with you, or otherwise investigate safety before installing in a way that isn't natural with *.sh. Does that make any amount of sense or am I just crazy?
Bash scripts give you visibility into what they are going to do by virtue of being machine instructions in a determimistic language. MD files you pipe to matrix multiplication has a much lower chance of being explainable.
Yeah, someone else was pointing that the bash scripts are guaranteed to do the same thing on every system which I think is in the same vein as your feedback. It's for sure a downside of the markdown that I need to explain the docs behind the proposal.
Time and time again, be it "hallucination", prompt injection, or just plain randomness, LLMs have proven themselves woefully insufficient at best when presented with and asked to work with untrusted documents. This simply changes the attack vector rather than solving a real problem
> "Installing software is a task which should be left to AI."
So, after teaching people to outsource their reasoning to an LLM, LLMs are now actively coaching folks to use LLMs for tasks for which it makes no sense at all.
Intent here is that this would be adopted by more difficult to install devtools which are unpackaged to the extent that you need a dependency like a specific version of Node, Python, or a dev lib.
Since the article has been changed to tone down its provocative opener, which clearly had a kicking-the-anthill effect, I'm moving those original reactions to this subthread.