Agent-first CLIs are about reducing turns, not JSON

After a month of making agent-first CLIs at work, I have settled on a few patterns that help coding agents over several tools my Claude uses every day. I was inspired by an interview with OpenClaw&rsquo;s creator Pete Steinberger . He talks about using CLI over MCP for agent tools, so I started to make my own gmail CLI as an exercise. I told Claude I wanted to make an agent-first CLI like…