AI-Friendly CLI

Overview

Human DX optimizes for discoverability and forgiveness. Agent DX optimizes for predictability and defense-in-depth. These require fundamentally different design approaches.

This skill provides 8 principles for building or refactoring command-line interfaces so that AI agents can invoke them reliably, safely, and efficiently. The core insight: agents hallucinate inputs, pay per token, and can't read interactive prompts. Your CLI must defend against all three.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• Adding AI/agent support to an existing CLI tool
• Building a new CLI that agents will invoke
• Wrapping an API as a CLI tool (REST, GraphQL, gRPC)
• Designing MCP servers alongside CLI interfaces
• Hardening inputs against hallucinated or malformed agent inputs
• Reducing token cost by limiting response sizes
• Adding structured output (JSON, NDJSON) to human-oriented CLIs