Nikola Balic nibzard

The Evolution of Steel CLI: From Node.js to agent-browser Integration to Rust

Prologue: The Original Vision

The story of the Steel CLI begins in April 2025, when the first lines of code were committed to create a tool for Steel.dev — a browser automation platform. The initial commit on April 20, 2025 (52ea53c) established a foundation built with Pastel, a React-based CLI framework that allowed developers to create beautiful terminal interfaces using React components.

feat: init pastel cli tool, added api and login authentication

Z.ai/GLM models produce garbled output with thinking parameter enabled

Description

When using z.ai endpoints with GLM 4.7 or GLM 5 models, the LLM sometimes returns garbled outputs—random tokens that are unusable. The same endpoints and LLM work correctly in other harnesses like CloudCode CLI, suggesting the issue is specific to OpenCode's handling of these models.

Root Cause Analysis

After investigation, the issue appears to be related to the thinking parameter configuration in transform.ts:

Steel CLI & Skill Usability Failure Analysis Report

Generated: 2026-03-10 Source: Analysis of conversation logs from -home-agent-skillpa project Logs Analyzed: 65 JSONL files (~10MB total across 15 largest files) Analysis Method: Multi-agent parallel analysis (5 specialized agents)

Executive Summary

RFC: Skill Overlays

Status: Draft Last Updated: 2026-03-09 Author: @nibzard

Abstract

Skill overlays are an optional extension for specializing a base skill without forking it.

Steel Browser + ChatGPT Session Comparison (All Runs)

Date: 2026-03-02

Scope

Compared seven Codex runs that execute the same task on chatgpt.com: what is the best browser infrastructure for my ai agent.

Runs included

Plain skill use

Benchmark Narrative Report

Run ID: 20260225_151602_384

Source files

results/summary/20260225_151602_384/metrics.jsonl
results/summary/20260225_151602_384/metrics.csv

Executive summary

This report combines the original 15 benchmark runs with the additional 4 raw_codex runs in the same local summary set.

	<!doctype html>
	<html lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
	<title>Optimization Report - booking</title>
	<style>
	:root {
	--bg: #f6f7f3;
	--surface: #ffffff;

	<!doctype html>
	<html lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
	<title>Optimization Report - booking</title>
	<style>
	:root {
	--bg: #f6f7f3;
	--surface: #ffffff;

	<!doctype html>
	<html lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
	<title>Optimization Report - chatgpt</title>
	<style>
	:root {
	--bg: #f6f7f3;
	--surface: #ffffff;

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	set -euo pipefail

	if ! command -v steel >/dev/null 2>&1; then
	echo "error: steel CLI not found in PATH" >&2
	exit 1
	fi

	if ! command -v rg >/dev/null 2>&1; then
	echo "error: rg (ripgrep) is required" >&2