Burn Your Flags: Interactive CLIs for Agents — Mark Lummus & Navinkumar Patil, PayPal

This post challenges the traditional approach of adding more command flags for agent interaction with CLIs. It highlights that interactive workflows inherently contain guidance and guardrails that agents can follow. The talk introduces three methods for enabling agent interaction with CLIs: tmux sessions for managing terminal state, IPC side channels for structured JSON communication, and context injection to make options and constraints explicit. It also emphasizes the benefits of using less expensive models and developing deterministic parsers for improved agent performance and accuracy in interactive CLI environments.