> Every developer, more or less, uses grep, awk, and sed to quickly build a temporary analysis platform. Although they can achieve the effect of a powerful data analysis pipeline in the hands of masters, they are still too difficult for most developers.<p>Something is not right with this thesis. Rather than learning the basic tools of their trade, this article encourages developers to reach for the nearest black-box LLM. This approach will certainly not scale, nor be replicable across any system.<p>The reason grep, awk, and sed are important to learn is because they are universal. Each of those tools, being decades old, is baked into the core fabric of most operating systems today. If you have access to a shell, you can get extremely far with just those 3 tools.<p>It's worthwhile to spend a couple hours a night for a week or two and become proficient in each. The dividends it will pay over one's programming career will be astonishing.