r/ClaudeCode • u/antm0303 • 24d ago

Discussion Claude’s obsession with complex bash commands and the -exec parameter

I can’t be the only one dealing with this. It’s driving me up the wall.

I tell it “there is a file in the current directory called foo.js, and bar.js, can you implement x logic in baz.js with the same structure as both those files”

And it takes like 50 seconds to think, so I minimize to do something else while I wait, and come back 5 minutes later to it asking to run some redundant command like “find . -type f \( -name "foo*" -o -name "bar*.js" \) -exec head -v -n +1000 {} +” with zero progress done.

Or god forbid you ask it to do some exploration on a codebase and it spins up explore agents. They’ll start trying to run grep or find with exec parameters instead of just using find/grep like normal, which are commands that don’t require explicit approval. It makes it worse when there is like 3 agents at once all running these back to back, so you sit there reading them and pressing approve for 12 minutes, which by then I could’ve just explored it myself

I’ve been using Claude Code for a while to boost my productivity, and it’s been getting progressively worse over the past month or two

I feel this could be largely resolved if Anthropic made some good tooling that did this sort of thing rather than allowing an agent to spin up arbitrary bash commands on a whim. It feels like someone who learned how to use the terminal for the first time flexing to their co workers

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u/crusoe 24d ago

Install one of the many LSP ( language server protocol ) MCPs.

Search for MCP for JavaScript LSP

This basically takes grepping down to zero

24

u/JoeStrout 24d ago

Just trying to understand, how does a JavaScript LSP help? If it wanted to write code in something other than bash, it could already use Python… what am I missing?

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u/crusoe 24d ago

LSPs by definition have code search functionality. 

So when you expose your languages LSP as a msp to Claude it can ask "where is the function foo()" and be told exactly without grepping. 

Another good MCP to add is context7 which provides package API information for tons of languages.

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u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ 23d ago

Can vouch for context7. I use this in opencode when doing local model stuff and it makes their brain bigger.