People keep asking me why they’d ever use an AI command-line tool when the GUI works fine. The answer: CLIs let you mix deterministic scripting with non-deterministic AI judgment calls.
Pure AI is hard to steer. Pure scripting breaks on edge cases. CLI tools blend both.
The Difference in Action
Here’s the example I show:
copilot -p "Write me three reports on Bob, Dave, and Larry"
versus
"Bob", "Dave", "Larry" | foreach { copilot -p "Write me a report on $_" }
The first is an AI call that might handle all three names or might not. The second is three separate calls with a guaranteed structure. You control the iteration. The AI handles the content.
Why GUIs Can’t Compose Like This
GUIs excel at one-off tasks and visual feedback. But they can’t compose operations the way CLI tools can. You can’t pipe a GUI through a loop. You can’t redirect its output to another tool. You can’t script around it when you need deterministic control flow with non-deterministic content generation.
The command line gives you programmable interfaces to AI. That’s the difference.