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CLI Developer

A skill for designing and building command-line tools with commander, click, typer, or cobra — argument parsing, progress UI, and shell completions included.

Dev & CodingIntermediate★ 12,125⑂ 1,162AI score 8/10Last updated: Oct 29, 2026

What it does

  • Forces a design-first workflow: map user workflows, define the subcommand/flag hierarchy, and draft --help output before writing code.
  • Loads language-specific reference guides for Node.js (commander, yargs, inquirer, chalk), Python (click, typer, argparse, rich), and Go (cobra, viper, bubbletea).
  • Adds polish: progress bars and spinners, TTY-aware colors, actionable error messages, and bash/zsh/fish completion scripts.
  • Enforces hard constraints — sub-50ms startup, diagnostics to stderr, graceful SIGINT handling, non-interactive fallbacks for CI/CD, no hardcoded platform paths.

Who it's for

  • Backend and DevOps engineers shipping internal or open-source CLI tools.
  • Developers refactoring ad-hoc scripts into a proper subcommand-based CLI.
  • Anyone who must support Windows, macOS, and Linux plus shell completions.

Example uses

  1. "Scaffold mytool greet <name> --loud with commander" → entry point, options, and error handling generated.
  2. "Add zsh completion and a progress bar to my typer CLI" → rich-based progress plus generated completion script.
  3. "My CLI hangs in CI waiting for a prompt" → rework into flag/env-var driven non-interactive mode.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills/HEAD/skills/cli-developer/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

If Claude can't open the link, open it yourself and paste the contents instead.

↓ If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
↓ Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on AI Skill Mart.
Copy the skills/cli-developer folder from the GitHub repo Jeffallan/claude-skills into my ~/.claude/skills/cli-developer/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills.git /tmp/claude-skills && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/claude-skills/skills/cli-developer ~/.claude/skills/

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills.git /tmp/claude-skills
  3. Create the skills directory: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  4. Copy the skill: cp -r /tmp/claude-skills/skills/cli-developer ~/.claude/skills/
  5. Verify the references/ files came along: ls ~/.claude/skills/cli-developer
  6. Restart Claude Code and ask something like "build a CLI with cobra" — the skill triggers automatically.
View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT