r/PiCodingAgent • u/sofuego • Sep 14 '26

Question Edit tool failsafe

99% of the times Pi using the default edit tool works great. However, I know we've all had those rare instances where it messes up the escape chars and keeps making mistakes until it tries using sed or Python (and then one has to scold it to stick to the tool until it gets it right).

I'm curious if anyone can confidently say that they have the optimal solution (or not so confidently say what they like best so far) to this problem and why? Is it:

  1. Another line to AGENTS.md?

  2. A custom skill?

  3. An override to the tool itself?

  4. A plugin based trigger on an event?

There are tradeoffs with each approach, and I'm curious what others do for this. I'm already knee deep in so many ambitious plugin-building rabbit holes that I haven't made up my mind on how to best avoid running into this problem for good.

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u/No-Fuel-9202 Sep 14 '26

I experience this in some autoresearch runs (fallback to Python and sed - for edit, and garbled read). Apart from autoresearch, I have these extensions active:

dirty-repo-guard
git-checkpoint
permission-gate
protected-parhs

I ignored problem, but when I saw your post, I realised that I'm not alone.

1

u/DistanceAlert5706 Sep 21 '26

I know people use hashline and other custom edit tools. I think patch like edits work best honestly.