Burn Your Flags: Interactive CLIs for Agents — Mark Lummus & Navinkumar Patil, PayPal
Interactive CLIs silently fail when AI agents use them, requiring agent-aware redesign
“The agent sees a redraw cycle, not a question. And the environment loses interface state.”
PayPal's developer tools team presented a workshop on why interactive CLIs break silently when AI agents invoke them — agents can't interpret arrow-key prompts or stateful redraws, so the CLI finishes without error but without completing the intended flow. The talk advocates redesigning CLIs to be agent-compatible, replacing combinatorially complex flag sets with context-aware interactive flows that degrade gracefully in non-TTY environments. Practical engineering signal for teams building tooling that agents will consume, but limited broader industry impact.