Part of the https://luma.com/code-maven events.
CLI Design for Humans and AI: Building Dual-Audience Tools in Go
Description
What happens when an AI agent runs your CLI tool? If your application relies on interactive prompts or raw stdout dumps, the answer is usually broken loops and hung processes.
In this talk, we'll build a CLI from scratch in Go, engineering it for dual consumption. We’ll cover why Go is an ideal language for building command line tools and how simple architectural tweaks can transform a standard terminal utility into an agent-friendly execution engine.
What you'll learn:
How to automatically switch between human UI (colors, spinners) and machine output (JSON/NDJSON) using TTY checks.
Techniques for stream separation (stdout vs. stderr) and token-efficient output filtering.
How to structure CLI errors so AI agents can self-correct and retry autonomously.
Bio
Miki has been shipping bugs to production for close to 30 years. Miki is a Python & Go expert who teaches and speaks all over the world, and has written technical books and many online courses. Miki loves open source, and has contributions in both the Go and Python worlds. He's also one of the organizers of GopherCon Israel, the Go Israel meetup, and the PyData Israel conference. When not shouting at coding agents, Miki likes to hike, read books, climb and annoy his kids.
Part of the https://luma.com/code-maven events.