stderr for AI

October 3, 2025

All these chats and various AI CLIs must have stderr

In fact, the UNIX founders invented stdin, stdout, and stderr with purpose - and made it possible to interact with everything separately.

Similarly, modern ChatGPT and similar tools must have a main output stream for results, while all their side “thinking… searching the web… activating the orbital laser to strike the Kremlin…” should be sent to stderr.

Even better—don’t limit yourself to just two streams, but provide multiple streams depending on the type of output:

• stdout – the answer
• stdfix – here’s your corrected query
• stderr – here I wrote that your tokens ran out
• stdvoice – here goes the voice output
• stdpicture – here’s your image