alt Hacker NewsKeep in mind that this likely destroys context and makes your costs go up considerably.
An agent often wants pipes so that it can `show_lots_of_logs | sed ...` and only see the part related to whatever error it's currently trying to debug. Without pipes, it has to take that entire log into the context. An agent without pipes is like a human without the ability to scroll.
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I guess ideally you'd want to force it to pipe each step back into the agent/IDE for display (and optionally wait for approval) rather than shoving it into the context. And with some sort of heuristic to skip commands that are piped into sed and similar.
or use just use actual files instead of pipes with a permissions dialogue gate on write. That would work already in Claude I think, and with IDE integration it would show each step as it went.
Of course buffering every step of a pipeline will have its own side-effects.
If only the piping wasn't execessively cutting too.. `cat | head -10` -> `cat | head -20` -> `cat | head -40` yeah.. I think at some point we need to start sanitizing our tool outputs so that this just isn't necessary at all, long term fixing the tools (ie: gradle outputs like 500 lines of logs for a ... build succeeded), maybe short term a small model in front would be better than all this cut loop fail. One can wish.