Designing CLIs for Agents, Not Humans — Pedro Lopez, Airbyte Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:01 [music] Hello everybody. Uh my name is Pedro. I'm a software engineer at Airbet. And today we're going to be talking about how we built our agent MCP and our CLI. Um, and before we go into the nitty-gritty of all of that, um, I wanted to give a bit of context on what we do at Airbet and how all of this kind of fits into, uh, our product. So, Airbite's been around for a while.

00:36 Um, we started as the open- source uh, standard for data movement. Um, connecting all of your SAS tools that you might be using like Zenesk, Stripe, uh, GitHub, etc. to um, your data analytics pipelines. And now we're using that same expertise and have evolved to being the data and action layer for your AI agents. Um, and we do that by offering a or agent product um that has what we call the context store which connects to all of those tools that that I mentioned before and sits in between your agents um to provide a

01:12 search optimized index of all of your data um that is able to be more efficiently queried by your agents. So, you're able to gather information about all of these um records and and and contacts and stuff that you might have in these all all these tools and join them together in an easy way uh through our contact store. And so, our goal is that we want to make data available and actionable everywhere.

01:41 And so, we have a couple different interfaces by which you can access this context store. Um, one is our SDK, which is more usable if you are uh building your own agents and your tools. Um, our UI, which is, um, just a quick way that you can use it through our web app. Uh, and then what we're going to be focusing on in this talk, which is our MCP and our CLI, which is um, a way to easily make that um, available within existing uh, agents like Chad GBT um, and and Claude.

02:10 So what exactly are we exposing through these interfaces? Um three main things. One is the ability to manage all of the the core resources of our product to our organizations workspaces and connectors. Um and so all these interfaces should let you uh interact with that. Second um super important is be able to authenticate those thirdparty services that I mentioned about earlier um and do so in a way that's secure and doesn't expose your credentials uh to to the AI agents.

02:44 And third um ask and act. So we want to expose the ability to search across the context store uh be able to read and write uh take action on all those systems. Um, and so we want all of our interfaces to be able to span across these uh three capabilities. Um, so the MCP and the CLI, the way the way that we've structured things is that they are thin unified interfaces into our platform, not reimplementations of the platform.

03:14 So most of the surface layer of these uh interfaces are presentational where you take a command uh and you call the platform and format the results in some way. Uh and everything kind of sits on top of our shared platform and APIs. Um and because we want to we deploy a lot, you know, our our platform changes like over 10 times a day, we want to keep these things up to date as we go.

03:38 And so a big part of this as well is open a open API uh specs as a source of truth for how to connect to to our APIs. And a lot of those interfaces um are built on top of uh those specs. Okay, so let's go into these interfaces. Let's start with let's start with the the MCP. And so MCPs are really great for users that might not be technical. Um, and in our case, it's great for those users that just want to plug their data straight into Chat DBT or Claude in an easy way.

04:13 Um, and the cool thing is they're they're very nicely packaged. They're very uh easy to install. For example, here's our um listing on the Chad GBT app. uh listing the official uh store that they have. Um and we also have a application for the the anthropic one uh which we're still pending on if there's anybody from Enthropic out there that wants to approve us.

04:36 Um but even if you're not on these marketplaces, um they are pretty trivial to install uh for a an end user. You just give it the hosted MCP URL and you're able to um connect pretty quickly. Okay, so let's look at uh an example. This is our MCP in action. Here I'm asking, you know, which connectors do I have available? Um, and it goes through, hey, I have four connectors set up in this workspace.

05:06 And then I can ask it some questions about my data like show five paying customers with Zenes support tickets. Um, and so this right now is looking through all the connectors that we have, searching the context store for that information that I that I asked it about. Um, and then combining that information across Zenesk and Stripe, um, so that it can come up with an answer for me.

05:29 Okay. And there we go. So it cross referenced Zenesk and Stripe and then came back with, you know, five of those people that um, have open support tickets. Cool. So let's go into kind of some lessons learned while building this uh MCP and things that you might want to keep in mind if you're doing uh something similar. So one thing that we decided to do um after trial and error is to keep the tool count small.

05:52 So um we for the execution part of the connector where you're pulling that data, we only expose or really deal with two main tools. one is to describe the connector to get the schema of how do you query that information and two is the execute that's able to read write and delete records. Um the opposite end of the spectrum here would be since we connect to so many different um connectors and each of these has different entities different actions you can take.

06:25 We could have exposed, you know, an MCP tool for each one of these. Um, but instead what we found is really keeping it narrow, using progressive discovery of all of the capabilities um that the connector has available. Um, and really limiting the amount of context that you shove into the those tool descriptions um really helps with the the performance of the of the MCP server.

06:52 Two, Olaf is the way. So this this refers to how you authenticate the MCP server itself. Um so this is an example for like anthropic. You click a button uh to connect and that spins up our ooth flow. So you can sign in to air bite um accept the the privileges and then you're all set up with all the connectors that you've uh linked up. Um, and technically you can use other authentication mechanisms through MCP, but you're really going to have a hard time um if you do like beer off or or anything like that because the

07:24 spec is really heavy on ooth and all of the clients, the the main ones at least um are really leaning towards the the OAF as a better UX for uh installing that connector. So that's an example for uh the the enthropic um custom connector um registration where they have no no way of you to put like a bearer token or anything. It's just all defaulting to to OOTH.

07:52 So that's is is very important. And two, users actually expect um to have long lived sessions uh through these MCP servers. Um unlike a web app where you might be okay with having to sign in again um a couple times, uh users expect to use MCPs more like a mobile app where they don't really have to think about authenticating. It's just available uh whenever they want to use it.

08:16 And so that has its own little um you know uh things to keep in mind as you're implementing ooth is keeping offline long sessions um that are stored separately from the web app and have its own set of uh of life cycles. Cool. Elicitation though is not the way. So I'll get into what elicitation is but a big part of um the MCP server that I mentioned is you need to be able to connect your tools.

08:44 you need to be able to give credentials in a way that's safe. Um, and to do that, uh, basically when you ask, you know, how do I connect to to HubSpot? Um, we generate a link that you go to which you can pops up this widget and you're able to select, you know, which uh entities you want to connect and redirect to to HubSpot to go through the that OOTH flow.

09:07 Um, now technically MCP has something in the spec that allows you to surface those kinds of URLs um and and process those inputs um called elicitation. It's a way that you can request information from the user. For the longest time um it was only form mode elicitation which is not um applicable for sensitive um sensitive uh data like credentials for an API.

09:34 But more recently um this URL mode elicitation became a thing um that is very similar to what we're doing. But the problem is uh support across the MCP clients. So that's a big theme uh when working with MCP is that even though there is a spec features that is are supported across the clients kind of vary quite a bit. Um so this is an example from cloud desktop where you know it just is telling me hey I don't support URL mode elicitation.

10:03 I can't do that. And so we had to go back to doing our own thing um and not using the spec for that for that kind of thing. Okay, let's talk about the CLI a bit. So if MCPS are easy for these non-technical users, um CLI are kind of the more technical counterpart might call it the kind of more powerful in some ways that we'll get into. And this is the the same example we saw earlier, but this time with the the MCP or sorry, with the CLI where we're asking, you know, which connectors do I have available?

10:34 It's this time loading a skill that tells it about the CLI. Um, and then, you know, using the CLI itself to query things. We got back the connectors. Then we asked, you know, show five paying customers that have Zenes support tickets. Same as last time. um it's able to this time use the CLI to query that query the context store aggregate that data and then eventually it should come back with a result now okay um so there's those same five um five users so um on the design side for CLI I think one important thing to

11:13 keep in mind is to design those CLIs with agents in mind um some of the things that might be helpful for users when you're making a CLI are going to be like blockers for agents. Um, and we'll get into that a little bit more. Um, the first design decision here that we made was take JSON in and return JSON out. So uh for humans it's very nice to specify um a bunch of flags uh to work with CLIs but when it comes to these more complicated um inputs that uh you have to build to to make these queries and agents are really

11:54 good at working with JSON. um they're able to construct this uh in a much more um direct and and less of a guessy way um than using those flags. And so on the output, JSON also makes it easy to deal with longer responses um be able to leverage one of the key capabilities of CLIs, which is hey, you have these this Unix system with pipes that you can redirect the output to different um programs.

12:25 So you can use jq for example to select certain certain things from the output and trim that and so JSON really unlocks a lot of that um capability. Two consistency is very much key here. So it should be dead obvious for agents to know how to do something across all of the resources that you're exposing. If you have structured your CLI in a way that it's it's structured where there's a noun and then a verb for this example you know connectors list connectors create make sure that when you're implementing a workspace um

13:01 CLI uh commands they also follow that same format. So workspace list is another one that that we have. And so it's very um critical that agents know the right way to do things and it's easy for them to know the right way to do things without having to read a bunch of documentation. And another interesting fact here is, you know, if you see agents making the same mistake over and over, um calling the wrong command a bunch of times, consider making that your contract.

13:31 Make it dead simple for agents to stumble across the the right way to to use things. um because that usually means that something is not quite as obvious as it should be in your AP in your CLI contract if agents keep making the same kind of mistakes. Three, skills are skills ship with uh the CLI tool. So skills are a must uh when you're doing CLIs because how else if you have a CLI installed is an agent going to know that that CLI even exists in the first place.

14:03 So it helps a lot with discovery of uh your tools that are available. Um and they also help with uh using that tool effectively. So uh we have a skill that gets surfaced. It has a a description that is able to come up whenever you ask anything about connectors. It knows to bring up that CLI and invoke it. Um and then the way that you structure the skill is also something to um think through.

14:28 you know, you don't want to put too much into the skill uh that you're going to bog down the context. Um, skills have this uh ability to be separated out into references um where you can have a main skill that points to other files in a in a skill directory um that can expand information about the the different commands. And that really uh helps cut down the the amount of uh of context that you're loading in and um leverages the progressive discovery um ability of uh of these agents.

15:00 Cool. And then another interesting fact uh for off side, off was interesting on the MCP side. It is interesting in other ways for CLIs because we can't assume that a human is going to be present to able to interact with those prompts. Um when CLIs are being invoked by agents, it can't sit there and wait for you to type um a prompt into the CLI. you have to expose things either through flags um or in the case of credentials environment variables and config files um so that things can be set up out of band and you don't

15:33 have to wait for that uh whenever you're invoking the CLI um and I would say aside from off um that's a general thing a lot of CLIs that are built for humans you type a command and it'll wait there ask you for prompts uh and that is not um you know able to be used properly ly by these agents. Um they'll just kind of get get stuck there. Um cool. So CLI and MCPs, which one is better?

16:03 Well, they both have kind of their own trade-offs. You know, with the MCP, the spec is not uniformly implemented across the board. Um there's a bunch of limits that these providers decide to implement aside from the spec as well. For example, like Claude has a 2 kilobyte limit on server and tool call uh descriptions. There's a limit of how long the tools can run.

16:25 So it's harder to do more longunning processes through MCP. Um and uh you know there's there's other kind of kind of limits that they've introduced there. And then on the CLI, the cool things about MCP like you know you can have a hosted MCP server that just is always updated. That's not quite the case with the CLI. you have to think more about versioning.

16:47 It's harder to keep packages up to date uh with all these new features. Um and there's no while the limits can be well limiting on the MCP side, not having any of those on the CLI across the tools uh across the the calls of the CLI can make things go wrong and continually go through loops that um you know make the agent spin. And so really I think both have their place.

17:13 I think MCPs are great for those non-technical users, be able to quickly prototype things, build one-off reports, um, and even leverage that MCP ecosystem to have things uh, talk to each other. And then the CLI is better for those more technical users, more longer running tasks, maybe outputs that are super long and you need to leverage those um features that Unix and and the pipes give you where you can redirect output to a file.

17:41 You can do a tail, do a head on that output. Um that's where really the the CLI um starts to to shine. All right, that is basically all that I had. Um, we have a booth over there at Airbite um that you should check out and come work with us. Thanks.