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.
My favorite is when Claude runs a slow process piped to tail only the last few lines, and then the result isn't what it expected, so it needs to rerun the whole thing.
Agents need a way to discard useless data out of context once it's served its purpose, instead of forcing them to preemptively tail everything.
This was so bad for me I actually added a tool hook that `time`s the tool calls and adds it as [Execution took: Xm, Ys] at the end of every tool call, it helps a little (claude in particular after two executions tends to switch strategy entirely) but in general the agents still insist on cut/tailing the output rather than just dumping it to a file for example!
Now that I think about it, maybe I can have a tool hook that detects those cut/tail exessive piping and just strips them and dumps the full output to a temp file..
My favorite is Claude finding .git/index.lock, asking to remove it, finding out it no longer exists, and then hitting a lock again that it itself created. Poor little robot, stop shooting yourself in the foot.
Could be worse! Claude just assumes repos all use git, and will try to run git commands against a Perforce repo unless your CLAUDE.md gives it strict instructions. When the git commands fail, it will just use chmod to make the files writable. (P4 marks files as not-writable until you check them out.)
