Skills · SkillEveryday codingReviewed

cli-for-agents

Designs or reviews CLIs that coding agents can run reliably: non-interactive flags, help with examples, errors and dry-run.

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Kind: Skill
Works with: Cursor
Source: cursor/plugins @ 9580c23696ac
Path: cli-for-agent/skills/cli-for-agents/SKILL.md
License: MIT
Jobs: Implementation

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# 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.

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

Examples:
  mycli deploy --env staging
  mycli deploy --env production --tag v1.2.3
…