Skip to content

vision input fails #559

Description

@mex7xx

Summary

Vision input currently works only through interactive TUI clipboard-paste and drag-drop (detectDroppedImageFile / detectClipboardImage → Jimp → base64 → {type:"image"}).
Environment

  • cmd v0.38.2
  • Installed via npm i -g command-code (mise)
  • macOS (darwin)
  • Model: Claude Sonnet 4 (claude-4-sonnet-20250514) — confirmed inputModalities: ["text","image"]
    Reproduce

1. Put any JPEG or PNG in the working directory

2. Run:

cmd -p "Describe what you see in test.jpg"
Result: Model responds that it cannot visually inspect the image. Same result for PNG, GIF, WEBP.
Root cause (from inspecting dist/index.mjs)

  1. read_file returns text-only output for all binary files
    src/tools/read-file/read-file.ts → formatOutput:
    function formatOutput(e) {
    if ("binary" === e.contentType)
    return [..., Binary file: ${e.fileType}].join("\n");
    // Model only ever sees: "Binary file: image/jpeg"
    ...
    }
    No {type: "image"} content block is ever created from a file read. The raw bytes are read into a Buffer but discarded.
  2. @filepath references silently skip binary files
    src/utils/file-references.ts → processFileReferences:
    if ("binary" === i.contentType) continue; // images vanish entirely
  3. AVIF and other modern formats fall through to the text path
    getFileType uses a hardcoded extension map (Ib) with no .avif entry:
    Ib = { ".png":"image/png", ".jpg":"image/jpeg", ".jpeg":"image/jpeg",
    ".gif":"image/gif", ".webp":"image/webp", ".svg":"image/svg+xml",
    ".bmp":"image/bmp", ".ico":"image/x-icon", ... }
    // No .avif, .heic, .heif, .tiff
    Since getFileType(".avif") returns "unknown", and isBinaryFile("unknown") returns false (it only matches known MIME values), AVIF files are read as UTF-8 text — producing garbled output rather than being flagged as binary.
  4. Vision content blocks only exist in the TUI paste/drag-drop path
    src/utils/clipboard-image.ts → detectDroppedImageFile → Jimp resize → base64 → {type:"image"}. This path is a React/Ink interactive handler and is not reachable in headless mode.

Expected Behavior

..

Actual Behavior

..

Steps to reproduce the issue

..

Command Code Version

latest

Operating System

macOS

Terminal/IDE

No response

Shell

No response

Additional context

No response

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    Fields

    No fields configured for Bug.

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions