u/Intelligent_Ear3578

I’ve been building agent-native CLIs for my own workflows and decided to turn what I learned into a reusable skill that might be useful for others.

The main idea:

As agents move from “API wrappers” to running inside ephemeral sandboxes, CLIs become a really useful interface. But they need to be designed differently.

A good CLI for agents should be:

• predictable
• scriptable
• easy to parse
• safe by default
• non-blocking
• clear when something fails

The skill covers things like:

• --json output for agents
• --plain output for scripts
• stdout/stderr separation
• avoiding blocking prompts
• useful exit codes
• actionable errors and hints
• command design patterns

link in the comment

With the launch of Notion Developer Platform, I keep thinking about something that feels increasingly relevant

If agents are going to do real work, a lot of that work will probably happen through CLIs

Notion has its own CLI
Salesforce has its own CLI
GitHub, cloud providers, internal tools, deployment platforms… same story

But once agents start using multiple CLIs, things get messy fast

Who decides:

--> which agent can use which CLI
--> with what permissions
--> in which environment
--> inside which sandbox
--> with which credentials
--> with what execution limits
--> and with what audit trail

I’m wondering if there should be an open-source layer for this

Something like a governance / orchestration layer for CLIs used by agents

A way to register CLIs, expose commands safely, run them inside controlled sandboxes, manage permissions, and track what happened

Not a product pitch, just trying to validate whether this is a real problem others are feeling too

For developers, platform engineers, DevOps teams, or anyone already experimenting with agents in real workflows:

would you use something like this if it were open source?

Or do you think CLI usage by agents should stay inside local scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling?