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Chat with CLI Agents

You can use your own Command Line Interface (CLI) agents with your Zide workspace to perform tasks within your projects.

Open a CLI Agent tab

You can use a CLI agent that is already configured and active on your local machine with Zide. To start a conversation with a CLI agent, click Terminal > Chat With CLI Agent and select a CLI agent. The chat opens in a CLI Agent content tab.

Your conversation with a CLI agent starts automatically. CLI agents are integrated into Zide and can read and edit files in your project. To connect a CLI agent to Zide, see Connect a CLI agent.

If a CLI Agent tab is already open when you start Zide, click Start Session to start a new conversation with your CLI agent.

Unrestricted CLI agent chat sessions ask to confirm the session before continuing the conversation. Click Don’t warn me again for this profile to skip the unrestricted mode screen in a new chat session. Sessions started in unrestricted mode display a Unrestricted badge in the header.

By default, press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on macOS) to search CLI Agent output, or right-click the output and select Find. The Ctrl+F in Terminal setting also applies to CLI Agent tabs. See Find in terminal output.

More actions in the CLI Agent header has Find, Export as Text…, and Assist with This. To show the tab in the Terminals activity, click the agent’s name in the header. The tab has a row there when Zide saves its output. When you save terminal output, Zide saves CLI Agent output too, and you can read it after the tab closes.

To start a CLI agent from the Terminals activity, click New and select the agent.

You can also use Zide Assist, an AI assistant built into Zide. For more information, see Zide Assist.

If a CLI agent does not start

If Zide cannot start a CLI agent, the CLI Agent tab shows Could not start with the agent name, the reason, and a Retry button. For example, the program can be missing from the path that the profile uses.

  1. Correct the problem that the tab shows:
    • For an auto-detected agent, click Terminal > CLI Agent Profiles, then click Auto-detect. Zide updates the path of an agent that it finds in a new location.
    • For a profile with a custom command, edit the profile and correct the Command field.
  2. Click Retry. Zide starts the agent again with the program path or command that the profile uses now.

For other failures, the tab tells you to see the Console, which shows the details.

Close an active agent

When a CLI Agent is producing output, Zide warns before closing its tab, its Project Tab, or the application. This follows the CLI Agent close-warning setting. An agent that has stopped producing output can close without a warning even if it is still working.