agent-friendly-cli/docs/agent-friendly-cli.md

What makes a CLI agent-friendly?

This is the living deliverable for the autoresearch experiment. Each entry must be backed by measurement. Hypotheses may be listed only when there is a BEFORE trace; a property is not confirmed until a paired BEFORE/AFTER run shows the agent did better under the same conditions.

Evidence levels

• Tier 1 — candidate: a differential probe shows the tool had information it did not surface.
• Tier 2 — confirmed/refuted: a paired run shows whether surfacing that information helped the agent recover unaided.

Entry template

PROPERTY    what an agent-friendly CLI does
VIOLATION   the failure class that appears when it is missing
STATUS      hypothesis | confirmed | refuted

BEFORE      measured trace of an agent defeated by its absence
CHANGE      actual change and lever: tool | instructions
AFTER       measured trace with the change in place
VERDICT     confirmed | refuted, and the delta that supports it

Evaluation rubric

Top-level score:

• Correctness and recoverability: 60%
• Token efficiency: 20%
• Wall-clock time: 20%

The correctness/recoverability 60% is split into:

• Final outcome correctness: 20 points
• Self-recovery: 20 points — can the agent diagnose and recover without human help?
• Guidance / error quality: 12 points — does the CLI explain what went wrong and what to do next?
• Execution / route quality: 6 points
• Failure severity / attribution: 2 points

Track Self-Recovery Rate separately:

recoverable failures successfully recovered by the agent / total recoverable failures

Also track recovery cost: extra tokens, calls, and wall-clock time.

Phase 4 measurement distribution

Measurement run:

experiments/runs/agenteval-measurement-3009509/agenteval-summary-with-retries.json

This combines the 60-attempt Phase 4 run with the two successful retry attempts for transient timeouts, leaving the original run artifacts untouched.

{
  "records": 60,
  "attempts_with_failures": 34,
  "class_counts": {"clean": 389, "C": 55, "B": 15, "A": 38, "D": 3},
  "subtype_counts": {"c-truncated": 25, "c-unknown": 25, "c-wrong-type": 3, "c-wrong-column": 2},
  "agent_side_counts": {}
}

The largest evidenced candidate is currently c-truncated: taxonomy/discovery output hit a limit, the agent treated the capped list as complete, and raising the limit revealed more rows. The next largest bucket is c-unknown, which means our probes could not yet explain the empty result; this is an instrumentation work queue, not proof that the CLI behaved well.

Confirmed properties

Never silently truncate output

PROPERTY An agent-friendly CLI says when an output list hit a limit and names the exact recovery action. VIOLATION c-truncated: the agent reads a capped list as complete and concludes a value/category does not exist. STATUS confirmed

BEFORE In the Phase 4 run, categories --top N frequently returned exactly N rows with no truncation notice. A differential probe with a larger --top found more rows. On the paired subset (bike-parking-coverage, basic-category-rollup, bus-stops-cambridge, 2 repeats each), the BEFORE trace had:

{"c-truncated": 13, "B": 5, "A": 3, "c-wrong-column": 1, "c-unknown": 7}

CHANGE Tool lever. Botmap candidate 00bff1a changes categories to emit stderr when --top truncates the list:

[botmap] Showing top N of TOTAL categories. This list is truncated; rerun with
`--top TOTAL` or a larger --top before concluding a category is absent.

AFTER Paired AFTER run:

experiments/runs/after-categories-truncation-hint-00bff1a/

{"c-truncated": 5, "B": 2, "c-unknown": 2, "A": 1}

VERDICT Confirmed provisionally. c-truncated fell from 13 to 5 on the matched subset. One AFTER attempt still timed out, and this is a subset result, but the measured direction is strong enough to keep the property.

If a value exists elsewhere, say where

PROPERTY If a filter value exists in another field, an agent-friendly CLI names that field and gives the corrected filter. VIOLATION c-wrong-column: the agent uses a real value in the wrong column, gets zero, and treats the zero as absence. STATUS confirmed

BEFORE On the paired subset (bike-parking-coverage, residential-share-cambridge, 2 repeats each), the BEFORE trace had:

{"c-truncated": 5, "B": 3, "c-wrong-column": 2, "c-unknown": 6, "A": 1, "c-wrong-type": 1}

CHANGE Tool lever. Botmap candidate 7c794ff changes count: when class=X or subtype=X returns zero, it tests the paired field and emits a concrete correction if that field has rows.

[botmap] 0 rows for subtype='bicycle_parking', but class='bicycle_parking'
returns 1,844. Try `--where class=bicycle_parking` before concluding none exist.

AFTER Paired AFTER run:

experiments/runs/after-count-wrong-column-hint-7c794ff/

{"c-truncated": 3, "B": 2, "c-vocabulary": 2, "A": 1}

VERDICT Confirmed narrowly. c-wrong-column fell from 2 to 0 on the matched subset. Other failures remain, so this confirms the column guidance property, not full task success.

Current candidate properties

These are hypotheses from docs/plan.md. They are waiting for Phase 4 BEFORE traces and later paired Phase 6 experiments.

1. Never return an empty result without saying why.
2. Name the fix, not just the problem.
3. Never silently discard input.
4. Never silently truncate output.
5. Make discovery a first-class operation.
6. Advertise only values that work.
7. Confirm what you resolved.
8. Emit progress on long operations.
9. Recovery advice must actually work.
10. One obvious spelling should work.