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Default System Prompt

Unlike most agentic development tools, Piebald does not currently have a default system prompt. For the present, we find that many models work just fine without a system prompt. When we implement emulation of other agentic development tools, you’ll be able to use their system prompts, and we’ll consider developing a system prompt of our own; however, a large system prompt will generally just waste token space for capable models like Claude and GPT-5.x that don’t directly need one.
When you use OpenAI models via a ChatGPT Pro/Plus subscription, we do pass a large system prompt. This is a hard requirement that OpenAI’s server imposes as a requirement to use the ChatGPT subscription API.This system prompt is the exact same one that Codex uses when you use it with a ChatGPT subscription.

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Built-in Tools

Piebald provides a set of built-in tools that are available to all models.
  • ReadFile: Reads a file from the file system. Does not add line prefixes. Auto-approved for file paths in the current project.
  • WriteFile: Writes the given contents to a file on disk. Overwrite existing files, if any. Auto-approved in auto-accept edits mode for file paths in teh current project.
  • EditFile: Replaces a given old string with a given new string. Auto-approved in auto-accept edits mode for file paths in teh current project.
  • Glob: Search for file paths via glob patterns, e.g. **/*.ts.
  • Grep: Search for text in a folder recursively using regular expressions. Accepts a variety of ripgrep-like options.
  • WebFetch: Returns the text content of page at the given URL.
  • WebSearch: Searches the web for the given query using Exa.
  • RunTerminalCommand: Runs the given terminal command. Uses sh on macOS and Linux and cmd /C on Windows, but you can configure the shell used for executing terminal commands.
  • TodoWrite: Updates the current todo list for the chat.
  • ProposePlanToUser: Prompts you to exit plan mode by displaying the given plan text as markdown.