🔧 Why Go Works Well for Building CLIs

The last post discussed the importance of command line interfaces (CLIs) in the AI agent stack. The next question is — what language works best for building CLIs? Consider the requirements:

• Often a CLI needs to interact with APIs.
• Easy to build and distribute to all platforms.
• A terminal user interface (TUI) is a nice touch.
• Reasonably fast. No one likes to wait for a CLI tool to start up.
• Easy to develop.
• Works well with AI.

Although many notable recent CLI tools use Rust, Go offers a pragmatic solution for most teams.

• Networking in Go is first class, so natural for APIs.
• AI is good at writing Go.
• Super easy to build for any platform.
• Reliable enough for most use cases.
• Charm packages make it easy to build a TUI.
• Can distribute as a single binary (embedded runtime/assets).
• Go is an excellent modern runtime.

The speed and extra reliability of Rust or Zig may justify those languages in some cases. However, development tends to be harder in those languages for most tasks. Go remains a pragmatic choice for getting things done.

DHH and Peter Steinberger seem to think so too ...