Burn your flags: How PayPal designs interactive CLI tools for agents

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: Mark Lummus — PayPal; Navinkumar Patil — PayPal.