Your CLI Deserves a Designer (And That Designer Is You)

The most critical interface your platform ships gets zero design resources. Here's the framework to fix that. Last year I scrolled through a PRD that changed how I think about command-line interfaces. Three pages of dashboard wireframes. Two pages of API contract. A fully documented rollout and customer communication strategy. Then I did a cmd+f for "CLI". Three words: "Add CLI support." I messaged my manager to ask whether I was looking at the right document and, if so, "why?". No wireframes. No UX spec. No interaction design. No guidance on command naming, flags, output format, or error handling. And the implementing engineer who would decide all of it? Me. Three Words in a PRD The CLI in question is the primary interface customers use to interact with their applications. For this particular feature, it was the only interface. CI/CD pipelines depended on it. AI agents were increasingly calling it. And no one had written a single line about what the interaction should look like. This