The interface layer for the agent era
CLIs are how AI agents get work done
The difference between chat and action is tools. CLIs let AI agents inspect systems, make changes, and verify the result.
See it in action:
What builders are saying
Real signals from people actually building agent-native tools.
unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water. […] api & cli will win. […] connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. […] the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need.
MCP is dead? […] I mostly use Skills and CLI lately.
Then we'll release the new agent-optimized CLI for Basecamp. Love to see agents drive their own accommodations.
CLIs are super exciting precisely because they are a "legacy" technology, which means AI agents can natively and easily use them, combine them, interact with them via the entire terminal toolkit. […] It's 2026. Build. For. Agents.
Introducing the Google Workspace CLI […] built for humans and agents. Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
2026 is the year of Skills & CLIs
This is why I'm not a fan of MCP, it speaks only to machines. Better CLI tooling, output formatting, docs helps both machines and humans.
Companies that market to developers will soon start “marketing” to coding agents as well. [...] Agent-friendly UI/UX (often: a good CLI) will be prioritized.
I tried with an MCP first but now I just use the CLI.
[…] I find CLI tools are almost always a better bet than MCPs when you have an unleashed coding agent like Claude Code in YOLO mode
there's a reason I didn't add mcp support to openclaw (except via mcporter mcp-to-cli converter)
Convert chrome-devtools (or really any) MCP to compiled cli […] It will call help menu and learn as needed. Progressive disclosure, no context pollution.
CLI is the rare interface where making things better for agents makes things better for humans too. And vice versa.
It's time for you to think about how an agent can use your app via CLI. In the future, none of us (including our agents) are going to want to log in to a web interface to do anything.
unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water. […] api & cli will win. […] connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. […] the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need.
MCP is dead? […] I mostly use Skills and CLI lately.
Then we'll release the new agent-optimized CLI for Basecamp. Love to see agents drive their own accommodations.
CLIs are super exciting precisely because they are a "legacy" technology, which means AI agents can natively and easily use them, combine them, interact with them via the entire terminal toolkit. […] It's 2026. Build. For. Agents.
Introducing the Google Workspace CLI […] built for humans and agents. Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
2026 is the year of Skills & CLIs
This is why I'm not a fan of MCP, it speaks only to machines. Better CLI tooling, output formatting, docs helps both machines and humans.
Companies that market to developers will soon start “marketing” to coding agents as well. [...] Agent-friendly UI/UX (often: a good CLI) will be prioritized.
I tried with an MCP first but now I just use the CLI.
[…] I find CLI tools are almost always a better bet than MCPs when you have an unleashed coding agent like Claude Code in YOLO mode
there's a reason I didn't add mcp support to openclaw (except via mcporter mcp-to-cli converter)
CLI is the rare interface where making things better for agents makes things better for humans too. And vice versa.
It's time for you to think about how an agent can use your app via CLI. In the future, none of us (including our agents) are going to want to log in to a web interface to do anything.
unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water. […] api & cli will win. […] connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. […] the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need.
unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water. […] api & cli will win. […] connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. […] the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need.
MCP is dead? […] I mostly use Skills and CLI lately.
Then we'll release the new agent-optimized CLI for Basecamp. Love to see agents drive their own accommodations.
CLIs are super exciting precisely because they are a "legacy" technology, which means AI agents can natively and easily use them, combine them, interact with them via the entire terminal toolkit. […] It's 2026. Build. For. Agents.
Introducing the Google Workspace CLI […] built for humans and agents. Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
2026 is the year of Skills & CLIs
This is why I'm not a fan of MCP, it speaks only to machines. Better CLI tooling, output formatting, docs helps both machines and humans.
Companies that market to developers will soon start “marketing” to coding agents as well. [...] Agent-friendly UI/UX (often: a good CLI) will be prioritized.
I tried with an MCP first but now I just use the CLI.
[…] I find CLI tools are almost always a better bet than MCPs when you have an unleashed coding agent like Claude Code in YOLO mode
there's a reason I didn't add mcp support to openclaw (except via mcporter mcp-to-cli converter)
Convert chrome-devtools (or really any) MCP to compiled cli […] It will call help menu and learn as needed. Progressive disclosure, no context pollution.
CLI is the rare interface where making things better for agents makes things better for humans too. And vice versa.
It's time for you to think about how an agent can use your app via CLI. In the future, none of us (including our agents) are going to want to log in to a web interface to do anything.
unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water. […] api & cli will win. […] connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. […] the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need.
MCP is dead? […] I mostly use Skills and CLI lately.
Then we'll release the new agent-optimized CLI for Basecamp. Love to see agents drive their own accommodations.
CLIs are super exciting precisely because they are a "legacy" technology, which means AI agents can natively and easily use them, combine them, interact with them via the entire terminal toolkit. […] It's 2026. Build. For. Agents.
Introducing the Google Workspace CLI […] built for humans and agents. Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, and every Workspace API. 40+ agent skills included.
2026 is the year of Skills & CLIs
This is why I'm not a fan of MCP, it speaks only to machines. Better CLI tooling, output formatting, docs helps both machines and humans.
Companies that market to developers will soon start “marketing” to coding agents as well. [...] Agent-friendly UI/UX (often: a good CLI) will be prioritized.
I tried with an MCP first but now I just use the CLI.
[…] I find CLI tools are almost always a better bet than MCPs when you have an unleashed coding agent like Claude Code in YOLO mode
there's a reason I didn't add mcp support to openclaw (except via mcporter mcp-to-cli converter)
CLI is the rare interface where making things better for agents makes things better for humans too. And vice versa.
It's time for you to think about how an agent can use your app via CLI. In the future, none of us (including our agents) are going to want to log in to a web interface to do anything.
unpopular (maybe?) opinion: MCP is dead in the water. […] api & cli will win. […] connect 10 servers with 5 tools each and you've burned 50 tool definitions worth of tokens before your conversation even starts. […] the "exec" tool paired with on-demand skills is all you need.
Or skip the search — install the agent skill · api/clis
Component distribution CLI — add beautiful, accessible UI components to any project. Agent-compatible with v4.
Official Firebase CLI for deploys, emulators, functions, hosting, auth, and project workflows from the terminal.
Official Google Workspace CLI. Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Sheets, Docs. MCP-ready.
Official HubSpot CLI for local app development, CMS workflows, account operations, and agent-friendly terminal automation.
Autonomous coding agent with terminal workflows, tool use, and long-running implementation loops for engineering tasks.
Service networking and service discovery CLI for distributed systems, service meshes, and infrastructure automation.
Python package installer and dependency management CLI used across virtualenv, build, and automation workflows.
Infrastructure automation CLI for configuration management, remote execution, and repeatable server provisioning.
Local Kubernetes cluster CLI for testing clusters, addons, and platform workflows on a developer machine.
Prometheus server and tooling CLI surface for monitoring, scraping, rules, and observability workflows.
Encrypt Kubernetes secrets for GitOps workflows using Bitnami Sealed Secrets from the command line.
Swift compiler and package tooling CLI used to build, run, and manage Swift projects.
Drizzle ORM migration and schema toolkit for managing SQL changes from code-first database workflows.
Distributed SQL database CLI for cluster operations, SQL access, and admin workflows in CockroachDB.
Run lightweight k3s Kubernetes clusters in Docker for fast local development and agent-driven test environments.
Container image builder CLI for OCI images without requiring a full Docker daemon.
Network bandwidth measurement CLI for throughput testing between hosts and debugging network performance.
Command-line packet analyzer from Wireshark for captures, protocol inspection, and network debugging.
Prometheus utility CLI for validating configs, testing alert rules, and debugging metrics workflows.
Kubernetes cluster operations CLI for creating, upgrading, and managing production clusters.
Java build automation and dependency management CLI for packaging, testing, and release workflows.
Application build, deploy, and release workflow CLI from HashiCorp for standardizing delivery across platforms.
Modern HTTP load testing CLI for benchmarking endpoints with concurrency and latency metrics.
Backup and restore Kubernetes clusters, volumes, and resources from the terminal.
CLI for querying and administering etcd key-value stores used by Kubernetes and distributed systems.
High-performance HTTP benchmarking tool for load testing web services from the terminal.
Python project and environment manager focused on modern tooling, packaging, and reproducible workflows.
Alertmanager CLI for silences, alerts, and operational workflows around incident response.
Multipurpose relay CLI for sockets, tunnels, port forwarding, and low-level network plumbing.
NCurses disk usage browser for navigating storage consumption interactively from the terminal.
Fast CSV toolkit for filtering, indexing, slicing, and analyzing tabular data from the command line.
Container Runtime Interface CLI for inspecting containers, images, and pods on Kubernetes nodes.
Infrastructure automation and configuration management CLI for defining and applying server state as code.
Fast disk usage analyzer for finding large directories and storage hotspots in terminal workflows.
Configuration management CLI for modeling desired system state and applying infrastructure changes reliably.
Like jq for HTML: query and transform HTML documents with CSS selectors in shell workflows.
HTTP benchmarking tool for stress testing APIs and services with simple command-line workflows.
Pure Go implementation of jq for JSON querying, filtering, and transformations in portable scripts.
Fauna database shell for querying, managing schema, and interacting with Fauna from the terminal.
HTML parsing CLI that lets you query markup with CSS selectors from shell pipelines.
Distributed tracing backend with CLI-oriented operations for trace storage, troubleshooting, and observability workflows.
Interactive JSON viewer with syntax highlighting and structured navigation for large API responses.
AST-aware diff tool that compares syntax trees instead of raw lines for smarter code review output.
Pipe Viewer shows progress, throughput, and ETA for data moving through Unix pipelines.
Count lines of code across languages and repositories for audits, reports, and engineering analysis.
Interactive jq terminal for exploring JSON data with immediate query feedback and navigation.
Display running coreutils progress bars and file operation status directly in the terminal.
Improved colored diff tool for side-by-side file comparisons and clearer terminal review output.
Why CLIs?
The interface layer for AI agents
AI agents don't click buttons — they run commands. CLIs are the primitives. Custom skills teach your agent how to use them for your project. Here's why that matters →