This isn't restricted to agents. It's generally annoying when any service I may want to use programmatically is exposed through a CLI but not an API. Sure, I can call a CLI from most programming languages, but I/O beyond arguments and return values is at best awkward, and especially on non-UNIX OSes performance can suffer due to process creation overhead for every command.

Recent example: The AWS CLI has a convenient "s3 sync" command that does a one-way directory sync, only downloadiong new files if existing files with matching sizes and timestamps don't exist, but the closest thing the .NET SDK has unconditionally overwrites destination files.

Another example: one of the nicest things about C# is how the compiler exposes itself as extensive library functionality, so, not only can I compile and run code at runtime, I can generate this code from programmatically created ASTs instead of text, parse expressions into ASTs, etc.

Yes - Or a working directory that’s under version control where they can write arbitrary memory files and maintain working state across contexts.

These are things devs often take for granted as being part of ‘how chat agents operate’ but they are specific to how claude code/opencode/pi/codex operate.

Giving agents a Unix computer account they can play with is definitely a powerful tool that makes them capable of doing a lot more (see: meta muse, OpenAI dots), in much the same way that giving a human a computer they are trained to use makes them way more capable… but it’s surely not the only way we can run these things.

you probably shouldn't complain about people "screeching" when this is the tone you respond to calm, measured discussion with.