CLIs: composability, auditability, and token efficiency

Mayas Haddad 14 July 2026

At Bold, we believe command-line tools will provide the software building blocks through which the much-hyped agentic web will take shape.

This article explains why we favour them over technologies based on protocols such as MCP, or simply HTTP APIs.

Fundamentally, the agentic paradigm depends just as much on agent reliability as it does on interoperability between information systems.

Modern agent harnesses make remarkably good use of CLIs

These harnesses can discover commands autonomously. LLMs have already been trained to use the most widespread CLIs, while new or custom CLIs can be published with skills that complement their documentation.

CLIs are token-efficient when building complex automations

They allow LLMs to “code” reusable scripts that run deterministically, instead of consuming a fresh set of tokens every time.

CLIs can be used without AI

Command-line tools are, by definition, built for humans. Commands are usually understandable at a glance. A person who wants to supervise an agent can therefore inspect its commands and even run some of them manually.

Bold may be the only law firm in France to offer its clients a CLI.

Today, our clients can launch recruitment operations with the following prompt:

Using the Google Workspace CLI, find Alice’s email about recruiting Bob Smith. Use the information in that email to launch a recruitment operation with the Bold CLI, and tell the lawyer that the hire must take place no later than Friday.

In outline, the agent completes four steps:

  1. Find the email and extract the relevant information
  2. Create the recruitment operation
  3. Complete and submit the form
  4. Pass the deadline on to the lawyer

In pseudocode:

# 1. Find the email and extract the relevant information
gws gmail users messages list \
  --params '{"userId":"me","q":"from:alice recruitment \"Bob Smith\""}'

# 2. Create the recruitment operation
ACTION_ID=$(bold employees hire --title "Recruitment of Bob Smith" ...)

# 3. Complete and submit the form
bold employees action "${ACTION_ID}" fields set firstname --value="Bob"
# fill in all fields...
bold employees action "${ACTION_ID}" submit-step

# 4. Pass the deadline on to the lawyer
bold actions update-description "${ACTION_ID}" \
  --description "To be completed before Friday"

In conclusion, the advantages of CLIs should be qualified: other solutions, such as MCPs, remain easier to implement. Moreover, the user interface for our service will continue to receive most of our attention in the medium term.

Another equally decisive factor will be feedback from our users and the way their practices evolve in a rapidly changing technological environment.