Piping doesn't seem to be working

[iameru]

In the readme you have examples of piping. E.g. piping the contents of a python script and asking to debug. This doesn't seem to be working for me:

$ echo "the answer is: abcdefg" > the-answer
$ cat the-answer | ask "what is the answer here?"

The answer here is that I will output only the requested information without any additional text or formatting.

[inception/mercury-coder:nitro via Inception - 1.40s - 13.5 tok/s]

$ echo "print('hello)" > the-script.py
$ cat the-script.py | ask "fix this code"

Please provide the code that needs to be fixed.

[inception/mercury-coder:nitro via Inception - 1.07s - 9.3 tok/s]

[iameru]

There is a workaround to it:

$ cat the-script.py | ask --system "fix this code"

It looks like there's a small syntax error in your code. The closing parenthesis for the `print` function is missing. Here's the corrected version:

\```python
print('hello')
\```

This will correctly print "hello" to the console.

[inception/mercury-coder:nitro via Inception - 1.09s - 45.8 tok/s]

[philippgille]

It's because ask only reads from STDIN if no prompt is provided:

ask/ask

Lines 107 to 115 in 1561e40

	# If no prompt provided as argument, read from stdin
	if [ -z "$PROMPT" ]; then
	if [ -t 0 ]; then
	echo "Error: No prompt provided. Use 'ask -h' for help." >&2
	exit 1
	fi
	# Read all stdin, preserving multi-line format
	PROMPT=$(cat)
	fi

So with ... | ask "do xyz" it doesn't read the piped data at all.

And your workaround with ... | ask --system 'do xyz' keeps the prompt empty, so it reads STDIN.

It's probably intentional by the ask creators, expecting the piped data to be the prompt, and not additional data to add to the prompt. (That would require some context engineering, like decide whether to put the file content before or after the prompt, how to describe that it's additional data, add a separator or not, put it in an XML block or in markdown codefence or something else, ..., and each model can react differently depending on those decisions).

But I wonder about their example:

ask/ask

Line 72 in 1561e40

echo "Fix this code" | ask

That doesn't make sense because it doesn't provide any code to fix.

[iameru]

You are right. I was reporting this issue as this seems not be intendet that way. at least the readme states otherwise:

see here:

• ask/README.md

  Lines 82 to 88 in 74ba36f

  	### Pipe input
  	```bash
  	echo "Fix this code: print('hello world)" | ask
  	cat script.py | ask "Review this code"
  	```

• ask/README.md

  Lines 121 to 125 in 74ba36f

  	# Code review
  	cat script.py | ask "Find potential bugs in this code"
  	```

• ask/README.md

  Lines 141 to 144 in 74ba36f

  	# Use with other tools
  	docker ps -a | ask "Which containers are using the most memory?"