Giving AI agents gdb

Modern AI agents face a fundamental limitation: they cannot interact with terminal applications. Consider the tools developers use daily: debuggers like gdb that step through breakpoints interactively, SSH sessions that require a TUI interface, or git’s interactive rebase that launches an editor. These applications render their interfaces to terminal screens that agents cannot perceive or control.

To solve this problem, I built a Nushell plugin that exposes terminal applications as typed commands. The plugin spawns processes in pseudoterminals, reads their visual output as structured data, and accepts input using vim key notation.

let debugger = tui spawn gdb ./program

This command spawns a gdb process and returns a record containing the session metadata:

╭────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────╮
│ id         │ 11600a04-6a47-466b-b54b-ca31c7e4432e │
│ command    │ gdb                                  │
│ args       │ [list 1 items]                       │
│ rows       │ 24                                   │
│ cols       │ 80                                   │
│ spawned_at │ now                                  │
╰────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────╯

To read what the terminal displays, pipe the session to tui buffer:

$debugger | tui buffer

The command returns the gdb prompt as a structured table:

╭────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  0 │ GNU gdb (GDB) 14.2                                                               │
│  1 │ Copyright (C) 2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.                                │
│  2 │ License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>    │
│  3 │ This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.               │
│  4 │ There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.                            │
│  5 │ Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details.                             │
│  6 │ This GDB was configured as "aarch64-apple-darwin23.0.0".                         │
│  7 │ Type "show configuration" for configuration details.                             │
│  8 │ For bug reporting instructions, please see:                                      │
│  9 │ <https://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>.                                        │
│ 10 │ Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:                 │
│ 11 │     <http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/>.                            │
│ 12 │                                                                                  │
│ 13 │ For help, type "help".                                                           │
│ 14 │ Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...                  │
│ 15 │ Reading symbols from ./program...                                                │
│ 16 │ (gdb)                                                                            │
│ 17 │                                                                                  │
│ 18 │                                                                                  │
│ 19 │                                                                                  │
│ 20 │                                                                                  │
│ 21 │                                                                                  │
│ 22 │                                                                                  │
│ 23 │                                                                                  │
╰────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

You can send input to the debugger and then read its updated state:

$debugger | tui send 'break main<Enter>'
$debugger | tui buffer | find "Breakpoint 1"

Use cases

The plugin enables several powerful workflows that were previously impossible for AI agents.

Control interactive debuggers programmatically:

let debugger = tui spawn gdb ./program
$debugger | tui send 'break main<Enter>run<Enter>step<Enter>'
$debugger | tui buffer | find "Breakpoint 1 at"

Execute commands on remote servers through SSH:

let session = tui spawn ssh user@server
$session | tui send 'tail -f /var/log/app.log<Enter>'
$session | tui buffer

Automate git interactive operations:

let rebase = tui spawn git rebase -i HEAD~3
$rebase | tui send 'jpick<Escape>:wq<Enter>'

Test terminal user interfaces programmatically:

let editor = tui spawn vim
$editor | tui send 'iHello, World!<Escape>:wq test.txt<Enter>'
assert ($editor | tui buffer | any { $in like "test.txt" })

This plugin is built as an open-source Nushell extension for Superglide. You can find the source code on GitHub or join the Discord community.