CLIs Are All You Need for Agents

Details

External ID

46555367

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

CLIs Are All You Need for Agents

Website domain

github.com

Launched

Jan. 9, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

5

Upvotes percentile

0.09617918313570488

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Fun agent I've been playing with - the idea is it only has access to a bash tool, and it's directed to create CLIs for use (with additional direction to make the CLIs composable, follow the Unix philosophy, etc).It persists these CLIs and knowledge about them get injected into the system prompt dynamically, so each time it runs it gets access to a larger and larger toolset of composable CLIs.One interesting dynamic that's emerged from this is I've started using these CLIs myself since they're the same interface for the agent or for me, and it's turned into kind of non-chat channel to interact with the agent.One example - I'll add tasks throughout the day myself using the `tasks` CLI it made, then when I interact with the agent it'll run `tasks list` and see everything I've added, or use it to prioritize/update things for me. Later on when I run `tasks list` myself I see all the updates/priorities it set.

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