What is cli-for-agents?

A set of design rules for command-line tools that AI agents and scripts can run without human interaction. It covers help text, flags, input and output, errors, repeatable commands, dry runs, and destructive actions.

Use it when designing, building, or reviewing a CLI for non-interactive use, pipelines, automation, agent workflows, or safer destructive commands.

It prevents CLIs from blocking automation with prompts, unclear instructions, unusable output, or unsafe operations.

cli-for-agents — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by pproenca

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add pproenca/dot-skills --skill cli-for-agents

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pproenca/dot-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/cli-for-agents/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/cli-for-agents)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/cli-for-agents"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/cli-for-agents/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/cli-for-agents"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pproenca/dot-skills/cli-for-agents.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,454 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Excessive Agency · line 71
Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.

Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00111	$0.02454
Opus 5	$0.00056	$0.01227
Sonnet 5	$0.00022	$0.00491
Haiku 4.5	$0.00011	$0.00245

Measured 5d ago against content hash 5819d5efcaba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cli-for-agents scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/.experimental/cli-for-agents/SKILL.md · 145 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent-Friendly CLI Design Best Practices

Prescriptive design and review standards for Command-Line Interface Design targeting AI agents and scripts, not just humans typing at a prompt. Human-oriented CLIs often block agents: interactive prompts, huge upfront docs, help text without copy-pasteable examples, error messages without fixes, no dry-run mode. This skill prioritizes rules by blast radius — from "the agent cannot use this CLI at all" (CRITICAL) to "the agent has to read help one extra time" (MEDIUM).

Use this skill both when building a new CLI and when reviewing an existing one for agent-friendliness.

This skill contains 45 rules across 8 categories.

When to Apply

Reference these guidelines when:

Writing --help text for any subcommand
Designing new flags, arguments, or subcommands
Crafting error messages or exit codes
Adding destructive operations that need dry-run or confirmation
Choosing between interactive prompts and flag-only inputs
Shaping success output so agents can chain commands
Reviewing an existing CLI for headless-usability regressions

Rule Categories by Priority

Priority	Category	Impact	Prefix
1	Non-interactive Operation	CRITICAL	`interact-`
2	Help Text Design	HIGH	`help-`
3	Error Messages	HIGH	`err-`
4	Destructive Action Safety	HIGH	`safe-`
5	Input Handling	HIGH	`input-`
6	Output Format	MEDIUM-HIGH	`output-`
7	Idempotency & Retries	MEDIUM-HIGH	`idem-`
8	Command Structure	MEDIUM	`struct-`

Note: help-examples-in-help is rated CRITICAL within the HIGH help- category because its specific failure — help text without examples — makes every other help rule moot. The category label reflects the average, not the worst case.

Quick Reference

1. Non-interactive Operation (CRITICAL)

interact-flags-first — Express every input as a flag first; prompts are TTY-only fallback
interact-detect-tty — Check isatty() before prompting
interact-no-arrow-menus — Replace arrow-key menus with flag-selected choices
interact-no-input-flag — Support --no-input to force non-interactive mode
interact-no-timed-prompts — Never use timed prompts or press-any-key screens
interact-no-hang-on-stdin — Don't block on stdin when a TTY is attached

Read the full file on GitHub · 145 lines

Files

What ships with it

49 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

5d ago First seen · 145 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A 5819d5efcaba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cli-for-agents is a skill published in the GitHub repository pproenca/dot-skills (205 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 2,454 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

Building agents DevOps and cloud

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

local-ai-agents

Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…

microsoft/ai-agents-for-beginners · 200 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens

next-partial-prefetching-adoption

Turn on Partial Prefetching in a Next.js app and work through the insights it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable or adopt Partial Prefetching, flip the partialPrefetching flag, opt routes in with export const prefetch = 'partial', audit Link prefetch={true} behavior, preserve existing prefetched UI with…

vercel/next.js · 103 tokens

chronicle

Analyze Copilot session history for standup reports, usage tips, session search, and session reindexing. Use when the user asks for a standup, daily summary, usage tips, workflow recommendations, wants to search or find past sessions by keyword/file/PR, wants to reindex their session store, or asks about deleting…

microsoft/vscode · 72 tokens