Designing CLIs for Agents, Not Humans — Pedro Lopez, Airbyte

This post contributes to agent harness engineering by detailing the design and implementation of two distinct interfaces for AI agents to interact with company data via Airbyte's Context Store: a Multi-Cloud Platform (MCP) server and a Command Line Interface (CLI). For the MCP server, it highlights best practices such as limiting tool count with progressive discovery, using OAuth for authentication, supporting long-lived sessions, and the current limitations of URL elicitation. For the CLI, it emphasizes designing for agents rather than humans, advocating for JSON in/out, consistent noun-verb commands, shipping skills with the tool, and avoiding interactive prompts. The talk concludes by providing guidance on when to choose an MCP versus a CLI for agent integration.