From Everything-is-a-File to Files-Are-All-You-Need: How Unix Philosophy Informs the Design of Agentic AI Systems

📅 2026-01-16
📈 Citations: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the limitations in maintainability, auditability, and runtime robustness of current AI agent systems, which stem from the absence of a unified resource abstraction and interaction paradigm. It systematically introduces the Unix philosophy of “everything is a file” into AI agent design, proposing a novel “files are all you need” paradigm. By leveraging file-like abstractions to unify heterogeneous resource interfaces and integrating Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), DevOps practices, and autonomous agent architectures, the approach establishes a consistent and composable interaction model. This significantly simplifies operational semantics and yields a principled framework for designing AI agent systems that are highly maintainable, auditable, and robust, thereby offering both theoretical foundations and practical guidance for future AI infrastructure.

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📝 Abstract
A core abstraction in early Unix systems was the principle that'everything is a file', enabling heterogeneous devices and kernel resources to be manipulated via uniform read/write interfaces. This paper explores how an analogous unification is emerging in contemporary agentic AI. We trace the evolution from Unix to DevOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, and finally autonomous software agents, highlighting how file-like abstractions and code-based specifications collapse diverse resources into consistent, composable interfaces. The resulting perspective suggests that adopting file- and code-centric interaction models may enable agentic systems that are more maintainable, auditable, and operationally robust.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

agentic AI
Unix philosophy
file abstraction
system design
resource unification
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Unix philosophy
agentic AI
file abstraction
Infrastructure-as-Code
composable interfaces