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Comment by chillfox

4 days ago

That's pretty much how I have been using coding agents. I get them to build small cli tools with a --help option and place them in a `./tools` directory. Then I can tell an agent to use the tools to accomplish whatever task I need done.

Usually when I mention a `tool --help` for the first time in a prompt I will put it in backticks with the --help argument.

It works really well.

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chillfox

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misiti3780  4 days ago

im going to try this. it sounds promising. can you provide an example for more context?

  • chillfox  4 days ago

    Sure,

    The agents have a tendency to make the "Examples" section of the help message way too long by stuffing it with redundant examples, so it needs to be manually pruned from time during development if you use an agent for tool development.

    `gh-install` is a fish script (using curl and jq), it was made by an agent.

      gh-install -h
  Usage: gh-install [-i] [-q] [-s] [-p PATH] [-n NAME] [-f FILE] [-e EXECUTABLE] <repo> [version]
    -i            - Show info about what would be installed (no install)
    -q            - Quiet mode (suppress all output except -i info line)
    -s            - Install to /usr/local/bin (system-wide)
    -p PATH       - Install to the specified directory (incompatible with -s)
    -n NAME       - Install with custom binary name
    -f FILE       - Select specific file from release assets and use as binary name (unless -n is specified)
    -e EXECUTABLE - Select specific executable from extracted archive (when archive contains multiple executables)
    repo          - GitHub repository in format owner/name
    version       - Optional version tag (defaults to latest)

  Examples:
    gh-install cli/cli v2.40.1
    gh-install cli/cli
    gh-install -i cli/cli (show info only)
    gh-install -i -q cli/cli (show info quietly)
    gh-install -s cli/cli (install system-wide)
    gh-install -p /opt/bin cli/cli (install to /opt/bin)
    gh-install -n gh cli/cli (install as 'gh')
    gh-install -f zed-remote-server zed-industries/zed (install server file)
    gh-install -e server some-org/multi-tool (install 'server' executable from archive)

    Prompt:

      Use `gh-install -h` to install asdf, hadolint, ripgrep, fd, delta and bat.

    If I need it to do something that uses multiple tools I might just tell it to look in `./tools` for the available tools, so the prompt would be something like this.

      Do x using the tools found in `./tools` (they all have a `-h` option).

    I also have several tools that are just js scripts using playwright (webpage as the api) to fetch data and return it in a json format. Then I can tell the agent to use that tool and jq to do data processing.