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You need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents

justin.poehnelt.com

21–30 of 74 posts

Re: You need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents

#21
And for more persistent services, worth considering using varlink, for your agents sake and just if you need two cli thinks to chat. https://varlink.org/

The systemd universe is moving this way from dbus, and there doesn't seem to be a ton of protest against giving up dbus for json over unix sockets. There's really not that many protocols that are super pleasant for conversing with across sockets.

Re: You need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents

#22

> Humans rarely typo a traversal. I don't think this is true?

The typos are a bit different, but that’s one reason I hate the command line as a human. You want me to hand type a file name? I’ll flip a letter or skip one!

I tab complete and fish shell also gives a nice little arrow selectable menu if options

Re: You need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents

#23
post #17

This feels completely speculative: there's no measure of whether this approach is actually effective. Personally, I'm skeptical: - Having the agent look up the JSON schemas and skills to use the CLI still dumps a lot of tokens into its context. - Designing for AI agents over humans doesn't seem very future proof. Much of the world is still designed for humans, so the developers of agents are incentivized to make agen…

Surely the skill for a cli tool is a couple of lines describing common usage, and a description of the help system?

Re: You need to rewrite your CLI for AI agents

#27
post #17

This feels completely speculative: there's no measure of whether this approach is actually effective. Personally, I'm skeptical: - Having the agent look up the JSON schemas and skills to use the CLI still dumps a lot of tokens into its context. - Designing for AI agents over humans doesn't seem very future proof. Much of the world is still designed for humans, so the developers of agents are incentivized to make agen…

Surely the skill for a cli tool is a couple of lines describing common usage, and a description of the help system?

Sure, but the post itself brags,

> gws ships 100+ SKILL.md files

Which must altogether be hundreds of lines of YAML frontmatter polluting your context.

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