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Sure, but it's pretty trivial to generate a CLI application that talks to that API.

That's how I let agents access my database too. Letting them access psql is a recipe for disaster, but a CLI executable that contains the credentials, and provides access to a number of predefined queries and commands? That's pretty convenient.

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Yes. But are you letting your agent make the decision of when and how to call that CLI? And presumably you're invoking it via the Bash tool. In which case your agent is free to write ad-hoc bash orchestration around your CLI calls. And perhaps you don't just have one such CLI but rather N for N different services.

And so we've arrived at the world of ad-hoc on-the-fly bash scripting that teams writing backend agentic applications in more "traditional"/conservative companies are not going to want.

Don't get me wrong, it's great for claude-code-type local computer automation use cases -- I do the same as you there.

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