its-just-shell

From Commands to Prompts: LLM-based Semantic File System for AIOS ↗

paper

Shi, Mei, Zhang et al. · 2025

Proposes replacing shell commands with natural-language prompts that compile down to the same POSIX file operations — the filesystem API is the stable interface, whether the caller is a human or an LLM
Demonstrates 15%+ retrieval accuracy gains and 2.1x speed improvement over traditional file systems by adding a semantic index layer, while preserving full POSIX semantics underneath
Includes safety mechanisms (confirmation before destructive ops, rollback) that map exactly to the trust-gradient argument: the OS already has the permission model, the agent just needs to respect it

paper

arXiv · October 2022

Interleaves chain-of-thought reasoning traces with concrete actions in an observe-think-act loop
Outperforms pure reasoning (chain-of-thought) and pure acting (action-only) on knowledge-intensive tasks by grounding thoughts in tool outputs
Foundational pattern behind most modern agent frameworks — the shell-like “read, eval, print” loop applied to LLMs

paper

arXiv · February 2023

Demonstrates that language models can learn when and how to call external tools (calculator, search, calendar) through self-supervised training
The model inserts API calls into its own text generation when doing so reduces perplexity — tool use emerges from utility, not instruction
Shows that tool augmentation is a natural extension of next-token prediction, not a bolted-on capability