Confused about @this, @visible and @buffer

[einarpersson]

Hi!

My expectation was that

1. opening a buffer
2. writing a "hello the secret number is 55"
3. selecting that line and do ask: @this what's the secret number

that this "would just work".

I expected that the contents would be sent as context. But it seems as if this rather sends the locations and then it is up to the agent to re-read the file.

I suppose this can be reasonable, but it

1. confused me. I clearly thought "this" was suppose to mean "the thing i have selected"
2. it assumes that i always work with a written file, rather than just drafting in a buffer
3. it assumes that the file is saved and up-to-date
4. it assumes that the agent itself has necessary permissions/tools to read the file (i have some agents that are restricted)

I also tried with @visible and @buffer and got similar results.

I am not saying that using references/locations are wrong, I just want to share my experience and ask if i am missing something. Should i use some other tag? or how do you solve things like this?

Nevertheless, it could be good to clarify this in the README list of contexts.

---

BTW, Perhaps it could be good to have a dry-run toggle or something to be able to see what is being sent to opencode without sending it? Could be very useful when experimenting and customizing things?

[nickjvandyke]

The plugin actually started by injecting the literal text, rather than a location. But sending the location allows the model to gather surrounding context and thus give a better response.

But you make some good points on the location-approach shortcomings. The opencode TUI actually used to translate locations into literal text itself (like when you type @<file> directly in the TUI). That was perfect and gave the best of both worlds! But that disappeared when they migrated to opentui 😢 Ultimately I think it's the best solution, so I hope they re-add it sometime soon. I think there's an open issue somewhere.

BTW, Perhaps it could be good to have a dry-run toggle or something to be able to see what is being sent to opencode without sending it? Could be very useful when experimenting and customizing things?

For sure! select previews the entire prompt w/ context injected. I've experimented with this in ask, just haven't had the time to refine it.

[nickjvandyke]

The opencode TUI actually used to translate locations into literal text itself (like when you type @ directly in the TUI). That was perfect and gave the best of both worlds!

I guess this still assumes the buffer points to a file, and has been saved. For the latter, you could wrap ask and select in a function that also saves the current buffer? For the former, I think we could detect that and inject the location content instead of a reference.

Most of this happens in Context.format() if you care to take a look 🙂

[nickjvandyke]

Perhaps renaming @buffer to @file (and @buffers to @files) would clarify the need for a corresponding file for opencode to read too.