Cli

• CLI First, GUI Never

  I’ve been enjoying building CLI tooling and so here’s why your next app should be a CLI not a GUI.

  CLI tools have longevity. If you design them for composability, there’s a good chance they’ll stick around because they’re much easier to plug into an existing ecosystem of other CLI tools. GUIs on the other hand come and go, as aesthetics change and as popular UI libraries rise and fall.

  I’ll be honest, this is just a thinly veiled excuse for myself to explore building CLIs in different languages. I’ve built them in TypeScript with Bun and I’ve built them in Python, but TUIs in Go really changed the game for me on what is possible.

  Tips for Building CLIs That Last

  Output JSON Structured output is way easier to parse with scripts, and agents appreciate the additional context that JSON provides. If you’re building tools in 2026, you’re building them for humans and machines.

  Wrap existing CLIs instead of re-implementing their APIs. You’re trading a raw API dependency for a versioned, maintained interface. Someone else is absorbing the upstream churn.

  Prefer stdin/stdout over files where possible. This works better if you ever want to containerize your tool, and it plays nicely with Unix piping.

  Logging matters. This kinda goes with JSON but any sort of logging is so important I’ll add it twice. Having some logging is non-negotiable, but structured logging really matters if you’re sending logs to a centralized provider.

  Single binaries are way easier to distribute than a zip file or a bunch of code someone has to set up. It’s fairly straightforward to set up GitHub auto-releases, though there are some steps that can trip you up. One approach: auto-create a new patch version on every commit to main.

  Three CLIs I Built (For Inspiration)

  Here are some personal examples to hopefully inspire you to build your own:

  • lsm — A local secrets manager. Instead of .env files sitting on disk, it decrypts and optionally injects secrets into your application runtime. lsm exec -- pnpm dev

  • repjan — A Go TUI that wraps the gh CLI to help you manage all your old repos.

  • positive.help CLI — Personal tooling for managing a website entirely from the command line. No admin dashboard needed.

  The Agentic Argument

  In the age of agentic development, CLIs that your agents can call are incredibly useful. An agent can call a CLI a lot easier than they can click buttons in a GUI.

  A GUI usually requires browser automation, maybe some scraping. It’s getting a bit easier now with APIs that return markdown from a site, but not everybody knows how to use those tools, and there’s usually a cost.

  If you want a signal, look at the adoption curves of agent-focused CLI tools over the last six months. GitHub stars aren’t a perfect metric, but the direction is hard to argue with.

  So this is your sign, you don’t need a framework. You don’t need a design system. If it’s good enough for grep, it’s good enough for your tool.

  Mar 26, 2026 / Golang / Development / Cli / Tooling

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