Burn your flags: How PayPal designs interactive CLI tools for agents

Official Schedule Context

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.

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