I built a CLI for Ghost
John O'Nolan built a CLI for his own product - and found himself using it in an entirely new way. The underlying trend here is really exciting.
One of the most fascinating things about the AI transformation is how quickly it’s pushed against the siloed model of web applications (not to mention mobile apps!) we’ve been used to for decades now. Claude Cowork and systems like OpenClaw use the inherent connectedness of our desktop computers to get stuff done. Command lines, the UNIX philosophy, and the openness of the filesystem itself are all plusses again.
Ghost’s founder John O’Nolan built a CLI for his platform — a UI that he probably knows better than anyone else on the planet — and found that it sped him up in ways he wasn’t expecting:
“[…] Within about ~1hr of using Ghost via Claude/CLI, it was hard to imagine going back to caveman-clicking around a browser to get something done. […] I know Ghost’s UI extremely well, and know exactly where to go and what to click to do the thing I want – and even for me, using Claude is significantly faster/easier than clicking myself.”
A fun thing about this is that an update that’s aimed at making AI use faster and easier is also potentially very useful for humans that don’t want anything to do with AI. A command-line interface can be used to script updates, connect with other systems, and integrate in ways that just aren’t as easy if you’re limited to a web UI.
For AI users, CLI tools are turning out to be more token-efficient than AI-native integrations like MCP. (And even MCP is encouraging every service to build an API at an accelerated rate.) For someone who has advocated for open systems with easy off-ramps for your data for decades, it’s slightly surreal. Suddenly what might have seemed like a niche thing to want to do is the mainstream, hottest thing in tech. It’s Web 2.0 mashups all over again — but on steroids.
Everything AI can do, a human can do too. There’s no reason in the world why a non-AI system couldn’t use MCP. There’s certainly no reason why they couldn’t use a command-line interface, one of the most venerable user experiences in computing. Whatever you might think about LLMs themselves, this is quite a lovely thing.
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