PayPal workshop: make CLIs agent-ready with tmux, JSON side channels, context injection
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-10-12
At AI Engineer World's Fair, PayPal's Mark Lummus and Navinkumar Patil argue that adding more CLI flags is the wrong fix for agents: agents can silently miss interactive terminal prompts, seeing only a redraw loop instead of questions and arrow-key options.
Using the Barista 9000 coffee-ordering CLI as a hands-on exercise, they demo three approaches:
- tmux sessions for sending keys and capturing terminal state
- IPC side channels exposing structured JSON instead of screen scraping
- context injection making options and constraints explicit
They also suggest cheaper models over maximum reasoning, discuss how audience solutions pushed toward deterministic parsers and low latency, and conclude: keep the CLI predictable while giving agents enough context and access to navigate decisions.
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