Can't speak for OP but I tried providing ast-grep in the execution context of an execute_bash tool, but even with pretty aggressive steering most models just don't seem to use it a lot. More expensive/SOTA models or higher reasoning increases the chances but lowers speed and raises cost. Maybe due to training bias for exploration tasks?

Yes, I've tried this passive approach too and didn't dig much further after that. I thought maybe they'd figured out something more intentional in the prompting to enable these kinds of approaches.