CLI

“Now with agents, they're becoming very CLI first. And so this one's kind of obvious to everyone, but you know, what spills out the other side of this is, okay, what that means is that everything is very code first. It's very Git first.”

“I think we're going to do a CLI with skills. So an MCP would be really good if we had more constrained sort of things. However, I think with the number of things that you can do employ, I think the CLI is going to be the way we do it.”

“CLI seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to ClockCode versus Cursor ended up doing so well. It's just so much more freedom being fully on the command line.”

“The average person does not want to use a CLI, right? Like I guess, I think there was this huge Trend the last few months. CLIs, we're going back to CLI. CLI is the future. Everyone will be working the CLI. That doesn't change the fact average people do not wa…”

“These things are really good at working with MCP and CLI. Like they're a little even better with CLI.”

“CLIs are over. We speed ran the CLI era. It was nice while it lasted, but I think it's pretty clear. It's not that CLI, sorry. It's not that CLIs are going to completely go away. Obviously they've been around for the last like, 30 years or 40 years or 50 years…”

“Where I think it's going is you and the agent are using the app together. The agent's probably using the CLI, but you're using the web interface and they're, they both need to be in sync.”

“Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not actually prohibitively annoying to agents. They're really, really nice, right? And so, if I wanted to hand you a CLI and I said, hey, guess what? The CLI has 40 arguments and. Right. 600 flags. You'd be…”

“How few, even tiny seed startups that are like, bleeding edge, Almost none of them have MCP and CLI, and the ones that do have two users, three users, is not, we are not nearly as far as Twitter would have you believe, right? We're like, oh, everyone's buildin…”

“And then I think the most important thing that's super cool is that there it's also inherently a bootstrapped. So if there's an issue of the agent can debug and fix itself within the same environment that it uses the tool, right?”

“MCP inherently has a really strong permission model. Like, all you can do is call the tools. A CLI is a little bit murkier. It's like, can I access the API token? Are you, like, properly sort of, like, re-encrypting the token so it can't, like, exfiltrate it? …”

“And so if we can have our agents properly execute code that calls on CLI deterministically, it's a one time cost, right? Versus constantly having a language model integrate with an MCP over and over and over and paying those like repeated token fees.”

“The CLIs are nice because they're super token efficient, and they can be made more token efficient really easily, right? Like, I'm sure you all have seen, like, I go to Buildkite or Jenkins, and I could just get this massive wall of build output. And in order …”

“So I, this is, I think, the future, how much it's weird, the futures of all this open Claw and agents and stuff is the CLI. People that are going to build startups with a CLI, Are going to win big.”

“And really, I think that's why we stayed in the CLI is because we felt there is no UI we could build that would still be relevant in six months because the model was improving so quickly.”

“If you need to, you can use MCPs on the fly. You don't have to restart, unlike, unlike Codex or Cloud Code, where you actually have to restart the whole thing. I think it's way more elegant, and also scales way better.”

“I build a lot of CLIs because that's where agents are really good. You know, you have to close the loop. That's always the secret. You have to give, you have to build it so that the agent has the best possible way to build software.”

“Because my premise is MCPs are crap. Doesn't really scale. People build like all kinds of weird search things around it. But you know what scales? CLIs. Agents know Unix.”

“Over the summer, I started using cloud code and I was like, wow, this is the future of programming. And they did something really special here, which is they just eliminated the text editor. Like you don't need that. You don't need the code editor. You just ne…”

“And then eventually I may just check the management pane and my desktop notifications and rarely have warp open at all. Except for inputting prompts. So it feels like a more progressive interface since we own everything beyond like the CLI itself.”

“It's almost more natural to a CLI than it is in a graphical user interface, because it feels like there's back and forth with the computer. Yeah. Almost funnily like a language model. So I think there's some interesting intersection of like CLIs and language m…”