CLI-Anything's cli-hub feels useful as a devcontainer entry point

Recently, a project called HKUDS/CLI-Anything has been getting some attention.

From the name alone, it sounds like “something that turns everything into a CLI.” But after looking into it a bit, it seems closer to a CLI layer that helps AI agents work with existing tools than to a simple utility that just adds a few convenient commands.

CLI-Anything has two major aspects.

One is cli-hub, which helps you find, install, and launch CLI wrappers for existing applications and tools. The other is a mechanism that works with agents such as Claude Code and Codex to analyze target software and generate agent-facing CLIs.

What first caught my attention was the latter. If it were installed in the development environment from the start, agents might be able to operate various tools more easily through the CLI. Even GUI applications and complex tools could appear as a stable command interface from an agent’s point of view. That is pretty appealing.

However, once I think about putting it into the default devcontainer environment, the story changes a bit.

The devcontainer template I use is basically an environment for writing source code. It bundles what I need for development with Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, and similar tools, and provides a foundation on which AI coding agents can work comfortably. I do not intend to install full desktop applications such as GIMP, Blender, or LibreOffice there. That would broaden the scope too much and make the image heavier.

CLI-Anything itself is not a replacement for the actual applications either. Even if there is a CLI for operating some app, you still need to install the app itself separately when required. In other words, rather than building an all-in-one automated environment into the devcontainer, it seems more appropriate to provide an entry point for finding CLI wrappers when needed.

What I am considering, then, is making only cli-anything-hub part of the standard setup.

pipx install cli-anything-hub

This gives you the cli-hub command. You can use it to inspect what CLIs are available or install only what you need later.

cli-hub list
cli-hub search <query>
cli-hub info <name>
cli-hub install <name>

At this level, the side effects of including it in a plain source-code development environment are fairly small. It does not pull in real applications on its own, and if you do not use it, it mostly just sits there.

On the other hand, I am still not entirely sure about installing CLI-Anything’s Codex skill or Claude plugin by default. Those feel less like dependencies required by the thing being built and more like a layer for tuning how you use the agent. Rather than something that should be preinstalled in a shared devcontainer, they look closer to personal configuration that each person opts into. Useful, yes, but a bit too opinionated for a template to do on its own.

So, for now, my conclusion is this.

cli-hub is a candidate for default installation.
CLI-Anything agent skills/plugins are opt-in.
The actual applications should not be included.

This line lets me preserve the lightness and generality of the devcontainer while still leaving room to find AI-agent-oriented CLIs when I need them.

AI coding environments can bloat very quickly once you start adding everything. But having only the entry point ready is not a bad idea. Rather than filling the toolbox to the brim, it is more like keeping a map inside that tells you where to get the tools. For now, that feels like the right distance at which to engage with CLI-Anything’s cli-hub.