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One of the things I'm wondering about is what I'm missing for $LLM to create files on the local FS like Claude and Codex do. What I see instead is stuff just printing to stdout, rather than files on the filesystem.

What am I missing?

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You're missing an agent. The model uses tool calls to interact with the filesystem, commands on the system, optionally search (you need a search MCP server, like Brave or Exa, and API key), etc.

I usually use the Zed Agent built into Zed editor for self-hosted models, but you could use Pi, OpenCode, Hermes, Claude Code, etc. there are many, many, agents.

The model just predicts text, Claude Code etc parse the output and do the actual file creation (or run shell commands that do it). If you have Claude Code installed look in ~/.claude/projects/... and you can see the transcripts of your actual sessions, or install Mini-SWE-Agent and play with that to get a feel for what's going on.

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