Use AI Agents to Experiment

I’ve come across mentions of fish, the shell, many times in chats and articles over the years. I’ve always been curious because I spend a lot of my time in the terminal.

Trying a new shell with the defaults is typically not a great experience. I know that is one of fish’s selling points—that the defaults are better than in other shells. And I don’t doubt that. It’s just not relevant to me. I’ve been schlepping my dotfiles between computers for almost 10 years. I don’t use the default zsh. In any case, as I’ve written before, I use a few shortcuts extensively to find files and commits. They are essential to my workflow.

And so it has been that trying out a new shell seems like a lot of work: trying to learn first how to customize it to make myself somewhat productive, while I figure out if I really like it or not. It has always seemed like a large up-front investment.

Last weekend, I figured: What if I ask my AI agent to port my zsh configuration to fish? It handled it without a problem. In a few minutes, I had a fish configuration that was so similar to my zsh configuration that I was getting confused as to which shell I was in. I added a 🐟 to my prompt as a reminder.

Of course, if everything was identical, then I am not really using fish. I then had a bit of a chat with the agent: With the context of what I typically do in the command line, my past experience, and what I’ve already customized. It gave me a few suggestions for what parts of fish I would get more mileage out of.

The results were so good that I was able to work in fish the whole week, with only very minor issues. A few times I reverted to zsh, but mostly to find a command in the history that I didn’t want to figure out from scratch¹.

I am still not convinced that I am going to be using fish going forward. The point is that using an AI agent lowered the cost of trying to use fish so much that I am now able to experiment. What other things can AI help me experiment with?