Resolving Agent "Terminal Blindness"
The article discusses a problem called "Terminal Blindness" where an AI coding agent can execute terminal commands but fails to see the resulting standard output or standard error. This is caused by shell integrations and fancy prompts that emit non-printable ANSI escape sequences and OSC codes.
Why it matters
Resolving the "Terminal Blindness" issue is crucial for AI agents to effectively execute and interpret terminal commands, enabling more seamless integration with developer workflows.
Key Points
- 1Terminal Blindness is caused by shell integrations and fancy prompts emitting non-printable escape sequences
- 2The agent's capture tools fail to synchronize with the output, resulting in an empty string being returned
- 3The solution involves separating the machine environment and interactive shell, and implementing agent detection and early return
- 4This issue is OS-agnostic but most prevalent on customized developer environments
Details
The article explains that modern shells often use plugins like ble.sh, Starship, Atuin, or IDE-specific integrations that emit hidden sequences to the terminal to handle command success/failure indicators, current working directory tracking, syntax highlighting, and prompt decorations. From the agent's perspective, when it reads the terminal buffer, its capture tools are designed to filter raw text. If the shell command is wrapped in heavy escape sequences, the capture tool often sees a "mangled" stream and fails to synchronize with the output, resulting in an empty string being returned to the agent. The solution involves splitting the shell configuration into a machine environment and an interactive shell, and implementing a detection block at the top of .bashrc that triggers when the ANTIGRAVITY_AGENT environment variable is present, allowing the agent to bypass the interactive "fluff" and see a clear stdout/stderr.
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