macOS ships grep, find, and cat — decades-old, POSIX-correct, and worse choices than the modern replacements once an LLM is the one calling them. Three reasons that's true, not just aesthetic preference:
- Context economy. ripgrep and fd skip
.git,node_modules, and build output by default and print compactfile:line:matchresults.grep -r/findwithout carefully hand-tuned exclusions dump everything, and every irrelevant line an agent reads is context it paid for and now has to reason past. - Fewer wasted round trips. Models are trained on a decade of GitHub, Stack Overflow, and blog content where these newer tools are increasingly the default. They emit correct
rg/fd/jqflags on the first try more reliably than the equivalentfind -exec greporawkincanta