@tduyng/pi-edit-path

Two round trips on the edit path are avoidable. One follows a failed edit, the other follows a successful one.

After a failed edit

When pi's own edit cannot find the old text, or finds it more than once, it reports the miss and nothing else. The retry usually starts with a re-read, and often misses again because the old text was written from memory.

The hint appends the closest region as it reads on disk now, with line numbers and current text, so the retry copies real lines.

Matching is by line agreement, not character similarity. Every distinctive line of the old text is looked up in the file the way pi's own matcher would read it, counting only lines of four characters or more, so a lone } never votes. The window of the old text's height holding the most of them wins. Under half agreeing means no region is shown, because a weak guess invites an edit against the wrong lines.

Line agreement hides the commonest cause. On one miss every distinctive line of a doc comment was present, because the model had re-wrapped the paragraph and written one word from memory. A line search cannot see a re-wrap, so the hint also names the lines that are not on disk at all.

The hint reports and never repairs. A miss that survives pi's fuzzy matching is a real mismatch, and applying a guess would write code nobody asked for.

Fusing the check

The other round trip is the one after the write. Edit a file, call bash to run the test, and that is a whole provider request to learn something the edit already implied.

then_run is an optional parameter on edit and write. It runs after the mutation succeeds.

edit(path: "src/retry.ts", edits: [...], then_run: {command: "bun test src/retry", timeout: 120})

It takes {command, timeout} in seconds, or the command as a plain string. On success then_run appends the output after [then_run:succeeded]. On failure it reports the mutation output first, then [then_run:failed] and the error, inside one thrown error, so the edit result is never lost.

When the check follows from the file the edit just changed, pass then_run. Use a separate bash call when the check spans files not yet written, or when the edit result has to be read before deciding what to run.

then_run is a parameter rather than a tool because the built-in definition is spread into the extension's own. Every property pi had stays, and one optional field is added. A second tool would need its own schema, its own permission story, and a model deciding between two ways to change a file.

Cost and switches

The hint adds no tool, no schema and no prompt text. It reads one file pi already named in its own error.

edit gains four guideline bullets and write gains two. Those six bullets are the whole prompt cost of the fusion.

then_run runs through the bash tool, so that tool has to be active.

Install

pi install npm:@tduyng/pi-edit-path

Local checkout: pi install /path/to/dotfiles/pi/agent/extensions/pi-edit-path

Limits

• then_run output keeps the last 12,000 characters, and the result says it was cut.
• The hint refuses files over 2 MB, lists at most 80 region lines and 10 match lines.
• The hint reads the file as it is now, which is not always what it was when the edit failed.