SE Radio 702: Derick Schaefer on Modern CLIs

Derick Schaefer , author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang ecosystem for CLI development, CLIs and APIs, CLIs and AIs, AI tooling versus MCP, the object-command pattern, command flags, API authentication, whether CLIs should be stateless, and output formats - json, rich text. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine .

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SE Radio 702: Derick Schaefer on Modern CLIs is an episode from Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers by SE-Radio Team.

This episode is 48:05 long.

This episode was published on Jan 7, 2026.

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