Why AI coding feels smoother on a Mac — and the first fix every Windows user needs

Sound familiar?

A friend on a Mac opens Cursor or Claude Code, types “write me a script that batch-renames these files,” and the AI writes it, runs it, done. You try the exact same prompt on Windows. The AI hesitates, then hands you a script. You run it: error. It patches it: another error. A few rounds later you’ve burned through a pile of tokens and the script still doesn’t work.

Frustrating? Very.

But here’s the thing: it isn’t your fault, and it isn’t really Windows’ fault either. The problem is what the AI was trained on.

In AI’s world, the command line means Linux and macOS

Every major model — Claude, GPT, Gemini — learned the command line almost entirely from Linux and macOS examples. ls, not dir. grep, not Select-String. chmod, not icacls.

Worse, the AI assumes you’re in a shell like Bash or Zsh. Drop it into the Windows PowerShell 5.1 that ships with Windows and it’s like asking someone who only speaks English to read a French menu: a few lucky guesses, mostly bluffing.

So what exactly is wrong with PowerShell 5.1? Three things:

• Encoding — where garbled text comes from. PowerShell 5.1 defaults to UTF-8 with a BOM, or even Windows-1252. AI-generated content is usually BOM-less UTF-8, so anything non-ASCII turns into mojibake. Try asking the AI to handle a file name with non-English characters and watch the errors pile up.
• Commands that behave differently. In PowerShell 5.1, curl is just an alias for Invoke-WebRequest, with a completely different set of parameters. Paste the AI’s one-line curl command and it won’t do what you expect.
• Friction with modern toolchains. Node.js, Python and Git all speak UTF-8 and follow Linux conventions. PowerShell 5.1 shipped in 2016 on the old .NET Framework, and it simply doesn’t get along with them.

The result: every conversation with your AI wastes a chunk of tokens on fixing compatibility errors. The AI isn’t dumb — it’s just talking to a shell from an older generation.

So what do you do?

First, untangle three names

Before we start, let’s untangle three names that confuse a lot of Windows users: “PowerShell,” “Windows PowerShell” and “Windows Terminal.”

Name	What it is	Command	How to use it
Windows PowerShell 5.1	The legacy shell built into Windows (2016, .NET Framework)	powershell or powershell.exe	Keep it for old modules and system compatibility; keep it out of your daily work
PowerShell 7	The modern rewrite on current .NET — cross-platform, open source, UTF-8 by default	pwsh or pwsh.exe	Your default for AI, development and automation
Windows Terminal	A good-looking terminal window that can host several shells	wt	Set PowerShell 7 as the default profile and make it your main interface

Think of it this way: Windows Terminal is your garage, PowerShell 5.1 is a 2016 clunker, and PowerShell 7 is a 2024 model. When you walk into the garage, you should end up in the new car, not the clunker.

Let’s go pick it up.

Step 1: check which car you’re driving

Press Win + R, type powershell and hit Enter. In the blue window, run:

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

If the major version is 5, congratulations — this article is for you. If it’s already 7, you’re in the minority; forward this to a friend who’s still suffering 😉

Step 2: install PowerShell 7

There are three ways to do it. Option A is fast and clean, and it’s the one I recommend.

🥇 Option A: install with WinGet (recommended)

Meet WinGet — the command-line version of an app store

If you’ve used apt/yum on Linux or Homebrew on macOS, you already get it: WinGet is Microsoft’s official package manager for Windows.

What it’s good for:

• Install software with one command — no hunting for download links
• Upgrade everything with one command — no clicking through updaters one by one
• Uninstall cleanly, with no leftovers

WinGet ships with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025. On Windows 10 (1809 or later), if winget isn’t found, install App Installer from the Microsoft Store.

📖 Want the details? Microsoft’s docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/

Installing it

① Make sure WinGet works:

winget --version

If it prints a version (for example v1.8.1911), you’re set. If it says the command isn’t found, install App Installer from the Microsoft Store first — it takes a minute.

② Confirm the package ID:

winget search --id Microsoft.PowerShell --exact

③ Install it:

winget install --id Microsoft.PowerShell --source winget --installer-type wix

WinGet downloads the latest PowerShell 7 and installs it for you.

I recommend the wix (MSI) installer: it installs to C:\Program Files\PowerShell\7\pwsh.exe. The MSIX package lands under C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.P…, and some tools only look for C:\Program Files\PowerShell\7\pwsh.exe.

④ Already installed and need an upgrade?

# Check whether an update is available
winget list --id Microsoft.PowerShell --upgrade-available
# If so, upgrade
winget upgrade --id Microsoft.PowerShell

⑤ Verify:

Close the terminal, open a new one and type:

pwsh

Once you’re in PowerShell 7, run:

$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

Major version 7? Done.

💡 Bonus: what else WinGet can do

With PowerShell 7 in place, you’ve also unlocked a superpower — you can install pretty much anything with WinGet:

winget search <keyword>      # search
winget install <app>         # install
winget upgrade --all         # upgrade everything at once
winget --help                # see what else it can do

Need VS Code? winget install Microsoft.VisualStudioCode. Git? winget install Git.Git. No more visiting download pages one by one.

🥈 Option B: the MSI package (enterprise / offline)

Download the .msi from GitHub Releases, double-click it and follow the setup wizard.

Or install silently with one command (handy for fleet deployments):

msiexec.exe /package PowerShell-7.6.4-win-x64.msi /quiet ADD_PATH=1 ADD_EXPLORER_CONTEXT_MENU_OPENPOWERSHELL=1 ENABLE_PSREMOTING=1

📖 Full docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/install-powershell?view=powershell-7.6

🥉 Option C: everything else (for reference)

• MSIX: search for “PowerShell” in the Microsoft Store — good if you’d rather avoid the command line.
• ZIP: unzip and run — useful if you want several versions side by side or a copy on a USB stick.
• .NET global tool: dotnet tool install --global PowerShell — for developers.

For most people, Option A is all you need.

Step 3: the three-point check

After installing, close and reopen your terminal, type pwsh to enter PowerShell 7, and check:

# 1. Version — should be 7.x
$PSVersionTable.PSVersion

# 2. Edition — should be Core
$PSVersionTable.PSEdition

# 3. Install path — should point to the PowerShell 7 directory
$PSHOME

pwsh not found? Troubleshoot in three steps:

1. Restart your terminals — Windows Terminal, VS Code, Cursor, your AI client. Close them all and reopen.
2. In cmd, run where.exe pwsh to see whether Windows can find it.
3. In PowerShell, run Get-Command pwsh -All to confirm.

Most of the time, restarting the terminal fixes it.

Step 4: make your AI agent actually use pwsh (the key step)

Installing PowerShell 7 is only half the job. Your AI agent may not know it’s there.

Many AI coding tools — Codex, Cursor, Claude Code — still call powershell.exe (5.1) on Windows by default, which means you installed PowerShell 7 for nothing.

Check by asking the tool itself:

Run the following commands and tell me the current PowerShell version and executable path:
$PSVersionTable.PSVersion
(Get-Process -Id $PID).Path

If it reports 5.1, you need to tell it explicitly: use pwsh.

Add this to the project root or your global config file (for Codex, that’s AGENTS.md):

## Windows shell rules

- PowerShell 7 is installed on this system.
- Run every PowerShell command with `pwsh.exe`.
- Do not use the legacy `powershell.exe`.
- Run PowerShell commands in this form:
  pwsh.exe -NoLogo -NoProfile -Command "<command>"
- Before the first command, run:
  pwsh.exe -NoLogo -NoProfile -Command "$PSVersionTable.PSVersion"
- If PowerShell 7 is unavailable, stop and tell the user. Do not fall back to Windows PowerShell 5.1.

Now your agent actually knows about PowerShell 7.

Step 5: level up with agent-skills

At this point your agent is no longer a fish out of water. But there’s one more piece that makes things noticeably better.

The open-source repo agent-skills collects reusable skill configurations for AI agents. One of them, powershell-safe-invocation, sets rules for exactly the traps AI agents fall into when calling PowerShell on Windows:

• Passing arguments to native commands correctly (no more cmd /c workarounds)
• Quoting and escaping paths (spaces and backslashes in Windows paths stop being a nightmare)
• Forcing UTF-8 to get rid of garbled text for good
• Starting processes and handling exit codes properly
• PowerShell-specific details such as how foreach pipelines are parsed

Installing it is simple. For Codex:

$repo = (Get-Location).Path  # the directory where you cloned the repo
$target = "$env:USERPROFILE\.codex\skills"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $target | Out-Null
Copy-Item -LiteralPath "$repo\skills\powershell-safe-invocation" -Destination $target -Recurse -Force

Using another agent? Point $target at its skills directory.

The repo also has a bilibili-page-reader skill that lets an AI read Bilibili video pages and subtitles — worth a look while you’re there.

Step 6: install coreutils so Windows speaks Linux

Your shell is now up to date. But a deeper problem remains: the commands themselves.

Remember the start of this article: AI training data is full of Linux/macOS commands. ls, grep, cat, find, sort are part of the AI’s native vocabulary, but on Windows they either don’t exist or behave differently.

The good news is that Microsoft noticed too. It open-sourced Coreutils for Windows, which brings the core Linux command-line tools to Windows, faithfully.

What it is

Coreutils for Windows builds on uutils/coreutils, a Rust rewrite, packaged as a single multi-call binary. Once installed, dozens of everyday Linux commands — ls, cp, mv, rm, cat, grep, find, wc, sort, echo, tee — work on Windows with the same flags and behavior as on Linux.

What does that mean in practice? You no longer have to translate the AI’s commands. It says ls -la, Windows runs ls -la. It says grep -r "error" ., Windows runs grep -r "error" .. That fixes the problem at its root better than any shell setting, because it closes the gap in the command language itself.

How to install

WinGet again, one line:

winget install Microsoft.Coreutils

Things to know

It’s still a preview project, so keep a few details in mind:

• It needs PowerShell 7.4+ (which you now have); 7.6+ is recommended for full ~ path support.
• Some commands clash with PowerShell’s built-in aliases — ls, cp and rm already map to native cmdlets in pwsh. After installing coreutils, PATH precedence makes the Linux versions take precedence, which is exactly what we want.
• Purely POSIX commands such as chmod and chown aren’t included, since Windows doesn’t have a matching permission model. That’s a sensible trade-off.

If a command doesn’t behave the way you expect, manage it with coreutils-manager:

coreutils-manager disable <command>   # disable a tool
coreutils-manager --help              # list all management commands

Wrapping up

Here’s what you did:

• ✅ Replaced the 2016-era Windows PowerShell 5.1 with modern PowerShell 7
• ✅ Configured your AI agent to always use pwsh
• ✅ Added agent-skills to standardize how the AI calls PowerShell
• ✅ Installed coreutils so Windows natively understands Linux commands

Four things, about 15 minutes. What you get back: an AI agent that runs as smoothly on Windows as it does on a Mac. No more mysterious encoding errors, no more “command not found,” no more tokens burned on compatibility problems.

So stop envying Mac users’ AI experience. Go upgrade 😎

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Originally published in Chinese on Zhihu by the author, 滴滴点到 (Liang Cui), and adapted for AI SI Daily.