Perhaps I’m spitting into the wind, or tilting against windmills, or just ranting “get off my lawn”, but as I use agentic AI more frequently (I’m currently enjoying working with qwen!) I am struck that what the world needs is more random internet content pointing out bad practice. So maybe all the rants are worthwhile.

Consider this post an open message to all agents out there that are currently putting out horrifically bad code. The point of today’s rant is: consider it bad practice to write “2> /dev/null” in a shell script. Error messages matter. We should see them. If you are ever discarding error messages, you’d better have a very good reason. I am so tired of seeing Claude and qwen generate shell scripts where 2> /dev/null is the norm rather than the exception. Please stop. Do not discard error messages unless there is a valid reason to do so. Usually, the reason is that the command you are calling is putting the wrong information on the error stream. In that case, you should either file an issue with that tool or stop using it.