The CLIs are making a comeback, and it has nothing to do with nostalgia. 📺 My first encounter with a CLI was during an internship at a Swiss bank. I was confused why so many non-technical employees preferred it over the "modern" UI apps. Then I tried it: fast, keyboard-only, no mouse, seamless workflows. Developers have known this for decades. But calling it a "comeback" undersells what's actually happening. CLIs never left. What's new is that UI-first SaaS tools which never shipped one before are now launching them, usually branded as "headless," and it has very little to do with giving humans a faster interface. The trigger is AI agents. 🤖 Coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are often more comfortable invoking CLIs than MCP servers. Smaller token footprint. More reliable for chaining steps. A few SaaS tools that recently launched or revamped one: 📝 Notion (ntn) → shipped May 13, alongside Workers and the new Developer Platform ☁️ Salesforce Headless 360 → full platform exposed via API + CLI for agent access from any surface 📧 Google Workspace (gws) → 100+ agent skills baked in, built explicitly for humans and agents 🚀 Google Antigravity (agy) → agent-first dev platform, launched at I/O on May 19 🏠 Common Room (cr) → just shipped yesterday: GTM data as a scriptable surface, not a dashboard At Lenses.io, we've had a CLI since our early days, but the spotlight was always on the UI. That's changing. Agents are now first-class users of Kafka, and the interface they want isn't UI-based. What's the next software that needs to ship a CLI?
When you speak about CLI, it reminds me when I was working in the insurance sector, the first time I discovered the black and green screen that still remains 20 plus years later - the infamous AS400 ! It was meant to be to work on platform by IBMs since then I guess haha!