Output & errors

JSON-first by design

rimo prints JSON to stdout by default — no TTY detection, no table formatting. The output of a command is the same whether you run it in a terminal or pipe it into a script, which makes it predictable for both shell pipelines and AI agents.

A few human-facing commands print plain text on success instead, because a JSON wrapper would just get in the way:

• rimo version and rimo upgrade
• rimo note ask (the streamed answer)
• rimo note get with --transcript, --document, --full, or --document-id

Even for these, errors are always JSON, so failures stay machine-readable.

Field filtering

--fields and --excludes apply to any command whose output is JSON.

--fields

Value	Behavior
"" (default)	All fields, full values
"compact"	All fields; long string values replaced with "[omitted]"
"f1,f2,f3"	Only these fields

rimo note list --fields compact
rimo note list --fields id,title,created_at

--excludes

Comma-separated field names to remove from output. Applied after --fields.

rimo note list --excludes transcript,document_markdown

Field filtering is especially useful for AI agents — request only the fields you need (--fields id,title) to keep responses small and cheap to parse.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	Error

The exit code is the reliable signal of success vs failure — check it in scripts rather than parsing output.

Error format

Any error is written as JSON to stdout and the process exits with code 1:

{
  "code": "error",
  "message": "unknown flag: --bogus"
}

Field	Description
code	Machine-readable error code. Currently always error.
message	Human-readable description of the failure (validation message, API status, etc.).