Burn your flags: How PayPal designs interactive CLI tools for agents
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Burn your flags: How PayPal designs interactive CLI tools for agents
- Day
- Day 1 — Workshop Day
- Time
- 4:30pm-5:30pm
- Room
- Track 9
- Track
- Workshops Day 1
Accessible with the Engineering + Workshops pass and above.
About this session
The common guidance for designing complex CLI tooling that agents can use is to add a 'non-interactive' mode, where a normally interactive & flow-based command can be executed in a single pass by feeding it a bunch of flags. This is necessary for deterministic automation, but agents aren't scripts; they aren't really constrained in the same way, and they benefit greatly from the same step-by-step contextual workflows that humans do. In this workshop, PayPal goes deep on techniques we've used in our upcoming `paypal` CLI that you can steal to make your complex CLI workflow tool agent-usable — without giving up the guardrails and guidance that interactive CLI tools provide.
