Cli For Agents

CLI for agents

Human-oriented CLIs often block agents: interactive prompts, huge upfront docs, and help text without copy-pasteable examples. Prefer patterns that work headlessly and compose in pipelines.

Non-interactive first

• Every input should be expressible as a flag or flag value. Do not require arrow keys, menus, or timed prompts.
• If flags are missing, then fall back to interactive mode—not the other way around.

Bad: mycli deploy → ? Which environment? (use arrow keys)
Good: mycli deploy --env staging

Discoverability without dumping context

• Agents discover subcommands incrementally: mycli, then mycli deploy --help. Do not print the entire manual on every run.
• Let each subcommand own its documentation so unused commands stay out of context.

--help that works

• Every subcommand has --help.
• Every --help includes Examples with real invocations. Examples do more than prose for pattern-matching.

Options:
  --env     Target environment (staging, production)
  --tag     Image tag (default: latest)
  --force   Skip confirmation