The objectives are to reduce/eliminate as much inference variability as possible. A side benefit is that inference costs collapse as well.

It is used internally for what we call 'compiled workflow agents' where no inference is necessary. An agent composer determines the exact command at design time. That is part of a discovery loop that can introspect the service to construct the command.

More here. https://www.promptone.ai/resources/downloads/

The command structure is provider/topic/command. Taken literally from the oclif framework, with the provider simply being a topic namespace. Haven't needed to pipe anything since in our deployments, the agent makes a call to the gateway via a command API so a pipe wouldn't be possible between commands

In many cases, the agent does hold the credential. When you authorize OpenClaw to read your gMail, OpenClaw has the credential. This is absolutely a poor practice, but common, nevertheless.

As for using the 'same tool', what I meant was that you the agent doesn't have to pick the tool at all. There is just one: the aclif CLI. Not separate tools for Salesforce, Docusign, Workday, etc that the agent needs to learn (and possibly mess up). Just the one aclif tool. Same grammar for all external services. Less agent inference the better.

Finally, alif CLIs support individual auth so a request can use SSO identities and fetch a token from a secrets value. The CLI holds the secret. If you deploy the CLI on a host or gateway, the agent never sees it.

LOL.

Here's a good set of questions for any write up:

Who are we talking about? What's their role? (What agent? What is the job to be done?)

What is the status quo? What's the problem with the status quo? What else has been tried? What's the consequence of not solving the problem? What more important problem do you need to work on that you're blocked because of this problem? What's the ideal solution? What's the current offer? Why would someone say no to any given solution? How have you addressed those problems?

I downvoted it because I thought it was a bot response. Did not realize you were referring to cli-printing-press. The main difference is that printing press caches a local copy of data heavy sites like Discord channels, ESPN, etc. and creates a CLI for that API.

aclif produces a single CLI with a unified grammar for all APIs, plus support for canonical names (fed by external semantic data layers) and unified auth. It targets enterprise SaaS APIs.