How to build agents with filesystems and bash

This post introduces a new pattern for agent context management by leveraging filesystems and bash commands. Instead of custom retrieval tools or vector search, agents are given access to data structured as files and the ability to use Unix commands (ls, find, grep, cat) to explore and retrieve relevant information. This approach is demonstrated to reduce costs and improve output quality for agents, as LLMs are already trained on vast amounts of code and understand filesystem operations. A case study of a sales call summarization agent shows significant cost reduction and quality improvement. The open-source `bash-tool` is released to facilitate this pattern.