jq

“Wrap the whole thing in a function and you can instantly test if a number is even from the terminal.”

“5-6 tokens telling it to use `jq` in AGENTS.md was the right call for us”

“I've caught Claude writing python scripts to parse JSON instead of simply using jq”

“Reaching for an existing tool like `jq` means burning a LOT fewer tokens.”

“jq is an awesome tool and bothers me deeply having claude generating some big fat python script for a single line jq command.”

“It would seem that curl + jq represents most of the solution these days.”

“even jq gets hairy when you have to do a bigger query or transformation”

“jq and regex really are sort of handy one liners that you invoke in other scripts”

“For small stuff I use bash / sed / awk / jq / yq / curl etc.”

“I never can keep the operators in mind (even though I loved the idea at first)”

“I love jq, though. It provides an extremely good language for its task”

“It's a nuclear weapon but it's almost a programming language and I never can keep the operators in mind”

“They're all "mostly compatible" but at this point there should probably be a formal spec / grammar”

“If you've ever met jq, you don't need anyone to tell you that `--json` is a very valuable thing to have.”

“I did this by hand with tmux and jq before deciding it wasn't going to be a good solution.”

“Thanks to jq-lang and the jq-wrapper tomlq it can even work around the lints/workspace.lints difference with little problems.”

“even LLMs often can't get the jq filter syntax right, or when they do, it looks terrifyingly cryptic and confusing”

“providing a few curl + jq oneliners to interact with a REST API works great in my experience”

“I find this much easier to write and understand than git's cryptic format strings”

“it did take me a while to come to terms with the syntax of assigning variables”

“Why most people strangulate themselves with confusing jq operators unnecessarily”

“even trivial tasks require us to go back to jq's manual to learn how to write their language”

“I feel like I'm still a beginner because I don't get where I want to go on the first several attempts”

“the pipelining has some implicit contextual stuff going on that I have to arrive at by trial and error each time”

“Great tool, but IMO it is more intuitive to JSON people that want a CLI tool than CLI people that want a JSON tool.”

“I find jq’s syntax and semantics to be simple and intuitive.”

“I don't think I remember one case where jq wasn't fast enough”

“JQ is very convenient, even if your files are more than 100GB.”

“The first 500 words explain more or less the entire language and how it works.”

“jq is supposed to fit in to other bash scripts as a one liner. That's it's super power.”

“backtracking implementation in jq is really the secret sauce for how it handles those complex filters”

“The problem is jq would need to JSON parse all that data which will be expensive.”

“I know jq can do wonderful things, but I'd seriously question anyone's competency if you're building a production code base that relies on a tangled mess of jq piping commands”

“piping through jq, chaining commands, redirecting to files... that's stuff I do daily”

“using yq / jq to performn a query was much (order of magnitudes) slower (>10m)”

“you could learn awk or jq, which are arguably more generally- and widely-applicable than nushell”

“the ability to search back through history is a valuable simple (rip)grep/jq combo over the session directory”

“jq language makes sense for hierarchical data structures but how much useful is it for table formats”

“what vastly improved the usefulness when working with big json responses”

“Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api”