the CLI drop

cli-anything

Give Claude Code control of almost any app. No MCP.

CLI Anything reads an app's source code and builds a command line tool for it, so Claude drives the real app from your terminal. Blender renders. Zoom books the meeting. LibreOffice writes the PDF. Here is the entire setup, and the honest limits.

48,258 stars on 26 Aug 2026 Apache 2.0, free, open source Data Intelligence Lab, HKU 103 CLIs on the hub, 35 categories

Get CLI-Anything on GitHub Browse the CLI hub ↗

pip install cli-anything-hub

github.com/HKUDS/CLI-Anything, captured 26 Aug 2026. Star count, licence and the hub link are all on this page.

Every link goes to the official repo or hub. Nothing here is mine and nothing is sponsored. I checked all of it myself on 26 August 2026.

PATH A · THE FAST ONEUse a CLI someone already built

The hub has ready-made CLIs for Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, LibreOffice, OBS Studio, Zoom, Kdenlive, Godot, FreeCAD, QGIS, Zotero, Calibre, Ollama, ComfyUI and more. Three commands.

The CLI-Hub, the registry of ready-made CLIs — The CLI-Hub. 103 CLIs in 35 categories on 26 Aug 2026. Browse, search, install.

1Install the hub

One Python package. It browses, installs, updates and removes every community CLI.

pip install cli-anything-hub

Needs Python 3.10 or newer.

2Find and install the app's CLI

List everything, search by name, install what you want.

cli-hub list

cli-hub search blender

cli-hub install blender

The CLI wraps the real app. Install the app itself too (Blender, LibreOffice, GIMP...). No app, no output.

3Teach your agent to use them

One skill install and Claude Code (or Cursor, Codex, Pi) knows how to find and drive every installed CLI.

npx skills add HKUDS/CLI-Anything --skill cli-hub-meta-skill -g -y

Then just ask: "render the scene in Blender and export a PNG". It runs the commands.

The README table: what kind of software CLI-Anything covers — From the README: what it covers, category by category. The first row is the whole trick: any open-source project.

PATH B · THE REAL TRICKBuild a CLI for an app that has none

This is the part from the reel. Point Claude at the app's source code and it runs a seven-phase pipeline: analyze, design, implement, plan tests, write tests, document, publish. Out comes a working CLI, installed to your PATH, with a skill file so Claude knows how to use it.

The seven phases of the CLI-Anything pipeline, from the README — The seven phases, straight from the README. Blender's harness came out of this with 208 passing tests.

1Install the plugin in Claude Code

Two slash commands. No config.

/plugin marketplace add HKUDS/CLI-Anything

/plugin install cli-anything

If Claude says "Unknown skill: cli-anything", run /reload-plugins and try again.

2Point it at the app

A GitHub URL or a local folder with the source. It reads the code and maps the app's actions to commands.

/cli-anything https://github.com/blender/blender

/cli-anything ./gimp

Big apps take a while. The generator runs all seven phases and ends with setup.py and an install to PATH.

3Grow it

The first pass covers the core. Refine finds the gaps and adds commands, tests and docs for them. Run it as many times as you like; each run is incremental.

/cli-anything:refine ./gimp

/cli-anything:refine ./gimp "more commands for batch image processing"

4Web services with no source

If it is an API rather than an app, feed the docs or the SDK to the same command and you get one stateful CLI instead of dozens of raw calls.

/cli-anything ./the-api-docs-folder

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKEThe repo's own Blender demo

An agent drives the Blender CLI, step by step, and builds an orbital relay drone. Left: the agent's build trace. Right: the render it produced. Both frames are from the demo in the repo, not from me.

The agent's build trace driving Blender through the generated CLI — The agent's build trace, command by command.

The orbital relay drone the agent rendered in Blender — The drone it rendered. Blender did the work; the agent typed.

THE HONEST PARTWhat it cannot do

It needs source code or an API. Blender, yes. GIMP, yes. Premiere Pro, no, not today: it is closed source and nobody has wrapped Adobe's SDK for the hub. Same for most paid desktop apps. The repo's own answer: find the open source alternative and point it at that (Kdenlive or Shotcut for video, GIMP for photos).

The token claim is a mechanism, not a number. An MCP server loads its whole tool list into your context before you type. A CLI loads nothing until you run it. That is why it costs less. Nobody has published a measured multiplier, so ignore anyone quoting one.

Blender

GIMPInkscape

Audacity

LibreOffice

OBS Studio

ZoomKdenliveShotcutGodotFreeCADQGISDraw.ioZoteroCalibreOllamaComfyUIAdGuard HomeOpenRefinen8nNotebookLM (community, experimental)Premiere Pro: not on the hub