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Command Line Interface Guidelines

“Abandon a standard when it is demonstrably harmful to productivity or user satisfaction.” — Jef Raskin, [The Humane Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface)

For agents: Command Line Interface Guidelines: an open guide to designing CLI programs and their usability. Summary only; the excerpt is thin.

command line interfacecli designunix guidelinesdeveloper uxterminal programs

Their llms.txt

The beginning of the file, from our validated copy saved 2026-10-20T23:45:51.974Z. Cached copy · Source on clig.dev

# Command Line Interface Guidelines

An [open-source](https://github.com/cli-guidelines/cli-guidelines) guide to help you write better command-line programs, taking traditional UNIX principles and updating them for the modern day.  

## Authors {#authors}

**Aanand Prasad** \
Engineer at Squarespace, co-creator of Docker Compose. \
[@aanandprasad](https://twitter.com/aanandprasad)

**Ben Firshman** \
Co-founder of [Replicate](https://replicate.com/), co-creator of Docker Compose. \
[@bfirsh](https://twitter.com/bfirsh)

**Carl Tashian** \
Offroad Engineer at [Smallstep](https://smallstep.com/), first engineer at Zipcar, co-founder Trove. \
[tashian.com](https://tashian.com/) [@tashian](https://twitter.com/tashian)

**Eva Parish** \
Technical Writer at Squarespace, O'Reilly contributor. \
[evaparish.com](https://evaparish.com/) [@evpari](https://twitter.com/evpari)

Design by [Mark Hurrell](https://mhurrell.co.uk/). Thanks to Andreas Jansson for early contributions, and Andrew Reitz, Ashley Williams, Brendan Falk, Chester Ramey, Dj Walker-Morgan, Jacob Maine, James Coglan, Michael Dwan, and Steve Klabnik for reviewing drafts.

<iframe class="github-button" src="https://ghbtns.com/github-btn.html?user=cli-guidelines&repo=cli-guidelines&type=star&count=true&size=large" frameborder="0" scrolling="0" width="170" height="30" title="GitHub"></iframe>

[Join us on Discord](https://discord.gg/EbAW5rUCkE) if you want to discuss the guide or CLI design.


## Foreword {#foreword}

In the 1980s, if you wanted a personal computer to do something for you, you needed to know what to type when confronted with `C:\>` or `~$`.
Help came in the form of thick, spiral-bound manuals.
Error messages were opaque.
There was no Stack Overflow to save you.
But if you were lucky enough to have internet access, you could get help from Usenet—an early internet community filled with other people who were just as frustrated as you were.
They could either help you solve your problem, or at least provide some moral support and camaraderie.

Forty years later, computers have become so much more accessible to everyone, often at the expense of low-level end user control.
On many devices, there is no command-line access at all, in part because it goes against the corporate interests of walled gardens and app stores.

Most people today don’t know what the command line is, much less why they would want to bother with it.
As computing pioneer Alan Kay said in [a 2017 interview](https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now), “Because people don't understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that 'Guitar Hero' is the same as a real guitar.”

Kay’s “real guitar” isn’t the CLI—not exactly.
He was talking about ways of programming computers that offer the power of the CLI and that transcend writing software in text files.
There is a belief among Kay’s disciples that we ne
…

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