2026: The Year of CLI Tools

The terminal is the closest runtime.

Here's the thing that Anthropic and others clocked early on: if you want to build an AI agent that can actually do things, the terminal is the obvious place to put it. It's the closest runtime that's easily accessible on every machine. No browser to spin up, no GUI to render, no server to deploy. Just a process, with access to the entire system.

Claude Code runs in your terminal. It can read files, write files, run commands, install packages, spin up servers, run tests, commit code. All because it has access to a shell. That's not a limitation. That's everything.

CLI tools are stupidly easy to build.

This is the bit that's going to cause the explosion. If you're a developer and you want to build something useful, a CLI tool is the fastest path. No UI to design. No hosting to set up. No authentication flow. No responsive breakpoints. Just parse some arguments, do the thing, print the result. Ship it.

Compare that to building a web app. You need a framework, a hosting provider, a domain, probably a database, definitely some CSS you'll fight with for three hours. A CLI tool? You can go from idea to working tool in an afternoon. And with AI writing most of the code now, that afternoon is shrinking to an hour.

I reckon 2026 is the year we see an absolute explosion of new CLI tools. Not just developer tools either. Productivity tools, data tools, automation tools. Things that would have been Electron apps five years ago, built as CLIs because why not.

The role has already changed.

There's a lot of noise right now about AI changing software engineering. Every podcast, every thread, every conference talk. And for once, the noise is warranted. The role has genuinely shifted. A significant chunk of code is now AI-generated. The value of a software engineer is less about typing code and more about understanding systems, making decisions, and directing the AI to build what's needed.

But the conversation I find more interesting is the one about everyone else. Product managers. Designers. Analysts. Project managers. The people adjacent to engineering who are watching all of this happen and wondering what they should be learning.

The terminal is a superpower for non-engineers.

I keep coming back to this. If you're a product manager and you want to be more effective in the age of AI, the single most valuable thing you can do is get comfortable in the terminal. Understand file structures. Understand file types. Know what a directory is. Know what a JSON file looks like. Know how to navigate around a codebase without needing someone to open VS Code for you.

This isn't about becoming a developer. It's about removing the layer of abstraction between you and the work. Every GUI is just a pretty wrapper around commands that the terminal can run directly. When you understand that, you stop being dependent on interfaces that someone else designed for you, and you start being able to do things yourself.

AI agents live in the terminal. The tools that are going to reshape how everyone works are CLI tools. If you can't use a terminal, you're going to be waiting for someone to build you a button. And by the time they do, someone who knows the terminal will have already finished the job.

Get in the terminal. It will give you superpowers.