Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: cli-review-runner

Black-box CLI grading harness — runs a test suite against a target CLI and reports per-rule pass/fail from the cli-for-agents 45-rule catalog. Use when reviewing, auditing, or grading a command-line tool for agent-friendliness. Trigger even if the user doesn't explicitly say "agent-friendly" — apply whenever they ask "is mycli good for agents?", "review this CLI", "grade my cli against the rules", "check if this tool is safe to automate", or "audit command-line design". Companion to the cli-for-agents distillation skill.

UncategorizedID: pproenca/dot-skills/cli-review-runner

Repository

pproenca/dot-skills
pproencaLicense: MIT
20717

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pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/pproenca/dot-skills/tree/HEAD/skills/.experimental/cli-review-runner

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skills/.experimental/cli-review-runner/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
cli-review-runner
Description
Black-box CLI grading harness — runs a test suite against a target CLI and reports per-rule pass/fail from the cli-for-agents 45-rule catalog. Use when reviewing, auditing, or grading a command-line tool for agent-friendliness. Trigger even if the user doesn't explicitly say "agent-friendly" — apply whenever they ask "is mycli good for agents?", "review this CLI", "grade my cli against the rules", "check if this tool is safe to automate", or "audit command-line design". Companion to the cli-for-agents distillation skill.

cli-review-runner

Automates the 10-item agent-friendliness audit from cli-for-agents. Runs black-box probes against a target CLI and emits a structured report mapping each finding to a rule ID (e.g., help-examples-in-help, err-non-zero-exit-codes, safe-dry-run-flag). Default mode is read-only - probes never run destructive verbs with real arguments.

When to Apply

  • User asks to review or audit a CLI for agent-friendliness, automation readiness, or CI use
  • User has just finished building a CLI and wants a pre-ship sanity check
  • User is grading their own or a third-party CLI against the cli-for-agents catalog
  • User is asking why a CLI is hanging an agent, blowing up context, or failing to compose in a pipeline
  • PR review for a CLI change - quickly regress-test the --help, errors, and dry-run flags

How to Use

The skill is orchestrated by scripts/review.sh. Point it at the target CLI (absolute path or PATH-resolvable name) and pick an output format.

# Default: text table on stdout, exit 0 if all passed, 1 if any failed
bash scripts/review.sh --target /usr/local/bin/mycli

# Machine-readable output
bash scripts/review.sh --target gh --format json
bash scripts/review.sh --target kubectl --format ndjson

# Supply subcommand list when auto-discovery misses them
bash scripts/review.sh --target gh --subcommands pr,issue,repo

# Preview what would run without touching the target CLI
bash scripts/review.sh --target mycli --dry-run

# Include risky probes on destructive verbs (off by default)
bash scripts/review.sh --target mycli --include-destructive

See bash scripts/review.sh --help for the full flag list.

Workflow Overview

--target <cli>
   │
   ▼
[1] Validate target       fail fast if path missing or not executable
   │
   ▼
[2] Load rule catalog     references/rule-catalog.tsv (45 rules)
   │
   ▼
[3] Discover subcommands  parse top-level --help (gh/kubectl/commander shapes)
   │
   ▼
[4] Run probes P1..P10    each probe emits NDJSON findings to a temp file
   │
   ▼
[5] Render report         scripts/render.sh  ->  text | json | ndjson

Read references/workflow.md when you need the full probe-by-probe breakdown, failure modes, and how to extend the catalog.

Probe Coverage

| Probe | Rules tested | Coverage | |-------|-------------|----------| | P1 Non-interactive | interact-no-hang-on-stdin, interact-no-input-flag, interact-flags-first, interact-detect-tty, interact-no-timed-prompts, interact-no-arrow-menus, input-no-prompt-fallback | Run under </dev/null with timeout; inspect help for interactive language | | P2 Layered help | help-per-subcommand, help-no-flag-required, help-layered-discovery | Top-level line count; per-subcommand --help; zero-arg invocation | | P3 Help examples | help-examples-in-help, help-flag-summary, help-suggest-next-steps | Grep each subcommand help for Examples:, short+long flag pairs, "See also" | | P4 Actionable errors | err-actionable-fix, err-include-example-invocation, err-exit-fast-on-missing-required, err-no-stack-traces-by-default | Invoke with bogus flag; grep stderr for fix + example; check for raw stack traces | | P5 stderr channeling | err-stderr-not-stdout | Error text must land on fd 2 | | P6 Exit codes | err-non-zero-exit-codes | Usage error and runtime error must produce distinct non-zero codes | | P7 stdin composition | input-accept-stdin-dash, input-flags-over-positional | Grep help for - stdin convention; count positionals vs flags | | P8 Structured output | output-json-flag, output-respect-no-color | --json produces JSON; NO_COLOR=1 suppresses ANSI | | P9 Destructive safety | safe-dry-run-flag, safe-force-bypass-flag, safe-no-prompts-with-no-input | Inspect destructive verbs' --help for --dry-run / --yes / --force / --no-input | | P10 Command structure | struct-resource-verb, struct-standard-flag-names, struct-no-hidden-subcommand-catchall, struct-flag-order-independent | Uniform shape, --help/--version present, unknown subcommand errors, flag position independence |

Coverage: 30 of the 45 rules in cli-for-agents are black-box testable. The remaining 15 (idempotency, state reconciliation, NDJSON streaming, bounded output, crash-only recovery, env-var fallback, secret-stdin, confirm-by-typing-name) require either real invocation or source-code inspection - the report lists them as "manual review required".

Configuration

config.json stores the verb classifier lists and default timeout. The skill works without any setup - defaults are reasonable. Override per-invocation via flags or edit the file for project-wide changes.

{
  "timeout_seconds": 5,
  "safe_verbs": ["list", "get", "show", "status", "describe", "help", "version", "config", "ls", "inspect"],
  "destructive_verbs": ["delete", "drop", "destroy", "remove", "reset", "purge", "rm", "del"]
}

Safety Model

All probes are read-only by default:

  • Safe verbs (list, get, show, ...) may be invoked with bogus flags to test error handling
  • Destructive verbs (delete, drop, ...) are ONLY inspected via --help - never executed with arguments
  • Every probe runs with a 5-second wall-clock timeout under </dev/null
  • The target CLI is sandboxed to its own process; no shell metacharacters in arguments

When --include-destructive is passed, probes may invoke destructive verbs with bogus flags too. This exposes the rare case where a CLI does something destructive before validating flags. Only enable this against CLIs you trust, or in a disposable test environment.

Self-test

Before shipping changes to probes, run the self-test - it generates a mock CLI that deliberately violates specific rules and asserts the probes detect them:

bash scripts/selftest.sh

Expected output: Results: 8 passed, 0 failed. Any failure points at a regression in scripts/lib/probes.sh.

Files

| File | Purpose | |------|---------| | scripts/review.sh | Main entry point - orchestrates probes, renders the report | | scripts/render.sh | Output formatter: text / json / ndjson | | scripts/selftest.sh | Sanity check against a deliberately-buggy mock CLI | | scripts/lib/common.sh | Shared helpers: timeout, verb classifier, JSON escape, catalog loader | | scripts/lib/probes.sh | Probe functions probe_p1..probe_p10 | | references/rule-catalog.tsv | 45 rules from cli-for-agents, mapped to probes | | references/workflow.md | Detailed probe-by-probe methodology, failure modes, extension guide | | gotchas.md | Known edge cases discovered during use | | config.json | Verb classifier lists and default timeout |

Related Skills

  • cli-for-agents - the 45-rule design catalog this skill audits against. Read rule files there when the report flags an issue and you need the full explanation.