Designing CLIs for Agents, Not Humans — Pedro Lopez, Airbyte
Airbyte redesigned its CLI and MCP as agent-first interfaces built on OpenAPI specs
Airbyte engineer Pedro Lopez describes how the company extended its data-movement platform to serve AI agents by building a unified MCP and CLI layer on top of its existing OpenAPI-backed platform API. The design prioritizes agent usability — secure third-party auth without exposing credentials, searchable context stores, and read/write actions — over human UX conventions. The engineering insight that CLIs should be thin, spec-driven presentational wrappers (not platform re-implementations) to stay current with high-frequency platform changes is the transferable signal.