AI/Coding/Tip/Avoid Non-Interactive CLI Commands When Defining AI Tools

• #Quote from Person/Erik Schluntz of Anthropic at 00:39:13: Tool Use Prompt Engineering | 38sec snip from Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

  • [It's important to have] ... iterations like that ... let us make the tool foolproof for the model
    

  • ... if the model ... opens vim, like, you know, it's never going to return. And so the tool is stuck. ... the tool is just text in, text out. It's not interactive.
    

  • ... it's not like the model doesn't know how to get out of vim. It's that the way that the tool is hooked up to the computer is not interactive.
    

  • ... basically, we just added instructions in the tool: "hey, don't launch commands that don't return."
    

• #notes I've seen CursorAI/Agent get stuck in git commands because the pager was interactive
  • See also StackOverflow/10/02/How do I prevent Git Diff from using a pager:
    • • #note consider setting git/Config/core.pager to use cat for AI coding
        • git config core.pager cat
        • since it can be set at the repo level or globally with --global, and because it's easier than setting up environment variables for each the different types of AI coding processes
        • #Warning

          • This would be terrible if you did  git/log in a repository with a large number of commits. Or worse, git log -p -- you'd get the entire set of commit diffs dumped into your terminal. #Quote from Person/Karen Etheridge