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shiro-neko/docs/agents.md
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Muhammad Zakir Ramadhan 5b8503fcd9 Initial commit: shiro-neko 0.1.0-beta.1
Agentic coding CLI on Bun, Ink, and the AI SDK.

Core: streamText loop with SDK-level tool approval so a denied call provably never executes; endpoint fallback for OpenAI reasoning models; retry with backoff.

Tools: read/write/edit/glob/grep/bash, path-jailed, gitignore-aware, ripgrep with a JS fallback, binary rejection, live bash streaming.

Agents: five variants crossing thinking level with tool restriction; plan and review withhold mutating tools from the model.

Extensibility: frontmatter skills with on-demand bodies, plugin host with blocking hooks, MCP stdio and HTTP, read-only subagents.

State: durable per-project memory, session task lists, session persistence, compaction that repairs provider-item dependencies.

Distribution: five-platform cross-compiled binaries with checksums, install scripts, CI on three operating systems.

404 tests, typecheck clean.
2026-09-02 17:30:18 +07:00

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Agents and thinking

An agent variant sets three things: how much the model deliberates, which tools it is offered, and a behaviour appendix in the system prompt.

shiro --agent deep              # at launch
shiro --agent plan --think low  # variant with an overridden level
/agent          picker
/agent review   direct
/think          picker
/think max      direct

The variants

Variant Thinking Tools Steps For
default medium all 50 ordinary work
quick off all 12 small, well-scoped edits
deep max all 80 hard problems, unclear causes
plan high read-only 50 investigate and propose
review high read-only 50 critique a change

quick tells the model not to deliberate, not to write a task list, and not to explore beyond what the change needs. Good for a rename or a one-line fix where thinking budget is pure latency.

deep asks for more than one hypothesis before acting, more reading before concluding, and findings recorded with remember so they survive compaction.

plan and review are genuinely read-only. write_file, edit_file, and bash are withheld from the model, not merely discouraged in prose — a model that cannot see a tool cannot call it. Their prompts also forbid describing edits as if they had been made.

Thinking levels

off, low, medium, high, max. They map to whatever the provider actually supports:

Level OpenAI reasoning_effort Anthropic thinking
off none { type: "disabled" }
low low budget_tokens: 6400
medium medium proportional budget
high high budget_tokens: 38400
max xhigh maximum budget

Verified against both wire formats rather than assumed.

Higher costs more and takes longer. off on a hard problem produces confident wrong answers; max on a rename wastes a few cents and several seconds. The variants pick sensible defaults, so reach for /think only when a specific turn needs something else.

Overriding

--agent deep --think low gives you deep's tools, steps, and appendix with a low thinking budget. The override clones the preset rather than mutating it, so a later /agent deep in the same session still gets max.

Defaults in config

{ "agent": "deep", "thinking": "high" }

A flag beats the config file. An unknown name fails at startup with the valid list rather than silently falling back:

$ shiro --agent turbo
shiro: Unknown agent "turbo". Available: default, quick, deep, plan, review

What the variant changes in the prompt

The system prompt describes only the tools actually offered, and the workflow rules adapt. Under plan the model is told it has no tools that change anything and that it cannot run commands, so it should say what to run rather than claim it passed. Under default it is told which tools need approval and to verify with the project's tests.

A prompt that describes a withheld tool teaches the model to attempt calls that cannot succeed, which is why the description is generated from the live tool set.