[porphyra]

Ironically, with the advent of AI agents and stuff, we're going back from "checkbox engineering" in GUI webpages to CLI tools. Every time I need to clear cache in cloudflare when I upload a new version of an asset, I have to click through a bunch of things. Would be nice to just message my openclaw agent to do it.

[deadbabe]

Why bother with OpenClaw? Just call the CLI command directly. That is the point of a CLI.

[tills13]

I think the point is that I don't have to remember the command. I just have to tell my agent in plain-English to do X.

For example, we're dragging our feet on Github Config as Terraform at our org so in the meantime I've been using Claude + the gh cli to deploy changes across repos. I don't need to know / remember the gh cli command to pull or push a ruleset, or script a loop in Bash, I just have to say

> Claude pull the ruleset from <known good repo> and push it to <repo 1>, <repo 2>, <repo 3>

The CLI is also nice because it abstracts away authentication. I have another flow which doesn't have a CLI and Claude is more than happy to interpolate the API key that it read from a config file into the chat history (horrifying).

[porphyra]

Exactly. Talking in plain English is a lot less mental overhead than reading the man page and figuring out the right command. Nowadays I just use AI instead of remembering ffmpeg commands too. Your point about authentication is important too.

[deadbabe]

What the hell am I reading, you guys know you can make little scripts for commands with prefilled options or even take in parameters?

[jillesvangurp]

That's what the coding agent does if you ask it to record a skill. Yes I can do that manually. But I'll get it wrong a few times before I get it right and waste half an hour in the documentation, if I'm lucky.

Or I just go, "I just created this cloudflare domain. Deploy the site via gh actions to cloudlare pages whenever I push to main. here are my credentials; put them in Github secrets." Or something similarly high level.

The clever thing here is not doing things manually but make sure you generate automation and scripts if you are going to do the same things more often along with skill files detailing how and when to call shit.

[porphyra]

Actually if you read the first five sentences of the article, the point of the CLI is to be friendlier for AI agents (in addition to being useful for humans presumably).

> Increasingly, agents are the primary customer of our APIs. Developers bring their coding agents to build and deploy applications, agents, and platforms to Cloudflare, configure their account, and query our APIs for analytics and logs.

> We want to make every Cloudflare product available in all of the ways agents need.

[shimman]

Yeah but you can waste $10-50 having an LLM do that for you instead rather than using your engineering experience to do it. Think of the shareholder value!