Comment by cmdtab

8 hours ago

Not just cheaper in terms of token usage but accuracy as well.

Even the smallest models are RL trained to use shell commands perfectly. Gemini 3 flash performs better with a cli with 20 commands vs 20+ tools in my testing.

cli also works well in terms of maintaining KV cache (changing tools mid say to improve model performance suffers from kv cache vs cli —help command only showing manual for specific command in append only fashion)

Writing your tools as unix like cli also has a nice benefit of model being able to pipe multiple commands together. In the case of browser, i wrote mini-browser which frontier models use much better than explicit tools to control browser because they can compose a giant command sequence to one shot task.