Building Interactive Programs inside Claude Code

Building Interactive Programs inside Claude Code This is something I've been discovering as I go, and I thought it was worth sharing more broadly. The pattern is simple but surprisingly powerful: build a CLI that Claude can reason about, and let it decide how to invoke it based on your natural language prompt. I stumbled into this while building an Android QA agent — you describe a test scenario in natural language and Claude executes it on a device, recording every command for deterministic replay. But the patterns I found apply far beyond mobile testing. They're general-purpose building blocks for making any CLI tool feel like an intelligent, interactive program. The Pattern: Claude as Your CLI's User The idea is to build a simple CLI and put Claude in front of it. Your CLI doesn't need to be smart. It just needs to accept flags and do its job. The intelligence lives in a skill, a markdown file that tells Claude how to map natural language to CLI invocations. In my case, the CLI wrap