Burn Your Flags: Interactive CLIs for Agents — Mark Lummus & Navinkumar Patil, PayPal
An agent can miss an interactive terminal prompt without producing an error.
Proof1 independent outlet
Key points
- The human sees a question and arrow key options; the agent sees a redraw loop and loses the interface state.
- PayPal's Mark Lummus and Navinkumar Patil use that failure to challenge the standard fix of adding more command flags.
- Patil introduces three approaches: tmux sessions for sending keys and capturing terminal state, IPC side channels that expose structured JSON instead of screen scraping, and context injection that makes options and constraints explicit.
- 0:00 - Introduction and the interactive CLI challenge
Sources (1)
- [1]Burn Your Flags: Interactive CLIs for Agents — Mark Lummus & Navinkumar Patil, PayPalAI Engineer (YouTube) · Oct 11, 08:30 PM
An agent can miss an interactive terminal prompt without producing an error.
The human sees a question and arrow key options; the agent sees a redraw loop and loses the interface state.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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