aws eks list-clusters - cluster name silently replaced with "date?" type placeholder
#1416 opened on Apr 20, 2026
Description
Bug
rtk aws eks list-clusters replaces the actual cluster name with date? instead of showing the real value.
Steps to reproduce
rtk aws eks list-clusters --region eu-central-1
Actual rtk output:
{
clusters:
[
date?
]
}
Real AWS CLI output:
{"clusters": ["argocd-dev"]}
Expected rtk output: compact but preserving the actual cluster name(s), e.g. clusters: ["argocd-dev"]
Root cause (investigated)
Inspected the rtk binary via strings - found a type-inference sequence: float, string, date?, string[.
The JSON compaction logic infers types for array element values and replaces them with the inferred type label. The cluster name "argocd-dev" is being misclassified as date? (uncertain date), likely because the hyphen-separated lowercase pattern word-word matches the date heuristic regex.
The actual string value is then silently discarded and replaced with the type label - so the information is completely lost, not just compressed.
Impact
- Cluster names are silently lost - the LLM receives
date?instead of the actual name - Affects virtually all real-world cluster names since AWS naming conventions use hyphens
- Workaround:
rtk proxy aws eks list-clustersreturns correct raw output
Environment
- rtk version: 0.37.1 (Homebrew, macOS arm64)
- Confirmed reproducible via the hook and direct
rtk aws eks list-clusterscall