[mpalmer]

The novice came to the master. "I have figured it out, the rules for how LLMs understand CLIs. It gives the right commands, but adds colons. It was trained on the visual shape of terminals, not keystrokes."

"Clear the session," the master said. "Run the same prompt again."

The novice pressed return. The model output: `ls -R /tmp`

"The colons are gone," the novice said. "But my theory explained them perfectly."

"You built a cage for a cloud," the master said. "Do not mistake a single roll of the dice for the rulebook."

[noemit]

I ran tests of 100 attempts with different prompt/scenario combinations. Each "attempt"/theory had 3 different system prompts wordings. Most of the prompts did not mention a colon, but it kept appearing. When I added negative instructions against using a colon, the quality went down (most of the tool calls were malformed, one common issue was markdown ticks in front) It was only when my system prompt acted like colons were normal that I kept getting 100/100 perfect expected tool calls. I ranked my system prompts by which returned the most consistent commands.