When AI Assistants Reach for CLI Tools

When AI Assistants Reach for CLI Tools

Working with AI coding assistants is fascinating. They’re incredibly powerful, but sometimes they surprise you with their tool choices.

Take this recent example. I was working with Github Copilot (model: Claude Sonnet 4.5) on a Kotlin test file, and it needed to rename a method call from update() to upsert(). Simple enough, right?

Instead of using its built-in edit capabilities, Copilot decided to go old-school:

perl -pi -e ‘s/storeStorageAdapter.update(/storeStorageAdapter.upsert(/g’ src/test/kotlin/MyStorageAdapterIT.kt

I had to pause and ask:

“Wait, what? Why are you doing it via perl? You have edit skills, use that.”

This put Copilot back on track and it replied:

You’re absolutely right, my apologies. Let me use the proper edit tool instead. Let me read the file and update it directly:

Both methods get the job done, but the built-in edit tool is the proper approach. Over time, tools get better and better, and I wonder if in a few weeks this will still happen.