Burn your flags: How PayPal designs interactive CLI tools for agents
Mark Lummus, Navinkumar Patil
- When
- Monday, June 292:20 PM – 4:20 PM · 120 min
- Where
- Track 4San Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
The common guidance for designing complex CLI tooling that agents can use is to add a 'non-interactive' mode, where a normally interactive & flow-based command can be executed in a single pass by feeding it a bunch of flags. This is necessary for deterministic automation, but agents aren't scripts; they aren't really constrained in the same way, and they benefit greatly from the same step-by-step contextual workflows that humans do. In this workshop, PayPal goes deep on techniques we've used in our upcoming `paypal` CLI that you can steal to make your complex CLI workflow tool agent-usable — without giving up the guardrails and guidance that interactive CLI tools provide.
Speakers (2)
Product Lead, PayPal
Software/product leader with 30+ years of experience spanning product management, software engineering, automation, DevOps, and business development.
Staff Software Engineer, PayPal
Engineer focused on large-scale and distributed systems.
More in Workshops Day 1
- Cooking with CodexMonday, June 29 · 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM · Track 3
- The best SDLC is the one you build yourself: Why orchestration changes everythingMonday, June 29 · 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM · Track 4
- AI Security Engineer Foundations + CertificateMonday, June 29 · 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM · Track 5
- Total Recall: Agent Memory and Harness EngineeringMonday, June 29 · 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM · Track 6
- Open-Source Inference Engineering for the Agentic EraMonday, June 29 · 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM · Track 8
For developers: this programme is open data — JSON, iCal, schedule XML and an MCP endpoint.Show endpointsHide
- JSONEvery published session and speaker, in one request./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.json
- iCalSubscribe in Google, Apple or Outlook Calendar./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.ics
- Schedule XMLfrab / pentabarf — the format conference apps import./aie-worldsfair-2026-import/feed.xml
- MCP + RESTPoint Claude at the programme. OpenAPI 3.1 included./agents
No key, no signup, CORS open. Everything here is generated from the same data the organisers edit.