Now CLIs are essentially replacing MCP. The nice thing is that a human can easily use them too. And they barely consume any context.

These days I like writing CLIs in plain Python with no extra packages. Everything ends up in a single readable file — just right for scripts.

LLMs write CLIs easily.

The ones I have:

  • logs – lets you look into logs filtered by various parameters
  • telepipe – sends a message to Telegram, no AI involved
  • playwright-cli – browser control

An example for playwright-cli:

playwright-cli open https://demo.playwright.dev/todomvc/ --headed
playwright-cli type "Buy groceries"
playwright-cli press Enter
playwright-cli type "Water flowers"
playwright-cli press Enter
playwright-cli check e21
playwright-cli check e35
playwright-cli screenshot