# SE Radio 702: Derick Schaefer on Modern CLIs

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineering-radio/se-radio-702-derick-schaefer-on-modern-clis
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineering-radio/se-radio-702-derick-schaefer-on-modern-clis.md
Podcast: [Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers](https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineering-radio)
Published: 2026-01-07T23:11:00+00:00
Episode link: https://se-radio.net/2026/01/se-radio-702-derick-schaefer-on-modern-clis/
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/seradio/702-derick-schaefer-modern-clis.mp3?dest-id=23379
Processing state: failed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/software-engineering-radio/episodes/se-radio-702-derick-schaefer-on-modern-clis
Duration seconds: 2885

## Resource

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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## Transcript

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