Jan Peer Stöcklmair

The CLI is dead, long live the CLI

Coding agents didn't kill the CLI. They became its most demanding users: they can't see a spinner, stall on prompts they can't answer, and treat error messages as instructions.

So we rewrote Sentry's CLI from scratch for humans and agents. This talk is a practical guide to building CLIs for both: output that adapts to its reader, prompts that never block, errors that tell an agent what to do next, and agent skills shipped inside the binary.

And no, MCP isn't dead either. We still run our MCP server, and I'll show when it beats a CLI, when it doesn't, and how we trace what agents do with both in production.

The human-only CLI is dead. Long live the CLI.