Positron assistant, stop installing stuff

[gshotwell]

The "install packages" tool call in assistant is pretty buggy and not that helpful IMO. It often gets stuck in a loop because it's not properly detecting the environment.

In general I think it would be good to have tool calling be configurable and non-blocking. If you have a tool which might block the chat interface then the user should always be able to skip the tool call or disable it.

[juliasilge]

Can you say more about when/how you are experiencing bugs? Would it be described by #8758 (like a global or system Python) or something else?

Can you also say whether you were in ask, edit, or agent mode? We are tracking problems with disabling tools for agent mode in #8290.

[gshotwell]

I'm in ask mode, it is similar to #8758, in that it's trying to install something and failing to pick up the installation path (I'm using uv to manage python, so the correct code should be uv add). More generally though I think that people more or less know how to install python packages and that's not something that the assistant should need to do.

[juliasilge]

Thanks! I've opened #9271 to track and prioritize improvements in this area.