“If agents excel at filesystem operations for code, they’ll excel at filesystem operations for anything.”

LLMs navigate filesystems and codebases with remarkable fluency, which suggests filesystem operations make a better agent interface than custom tooling. Vercel found that replacing complex custom tools with basic Unix commands (ls, find, grep, cat) cut costs 75% while improving output quality. Directory hierarchies map naturally to domain-specific data structures like customer records and tickets. Precise retrieval using grep beats both prompt stuffing and vector search for structured data lookups.