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CLI Developer

A specialist skill for designing, building, and polishing command-line tools with commander, click, typer, or cobra.

Dev & CodingIntermediate★ 11,470⑂ 1,103AI score 8/10Last updated: Aug 7, 2026

What it does

  • Walks a five-step workflow: analyze UX, design the command/flag tree, implement with the right framework, polish, then test cross-platform.
  • Loads language-specific references on demand for Node.js (commander, yargs, inquirer), Python (click, typer, rich), and Go (cobra, viper, bubbletea).
  • Adds progress bars, spinners, TTY-aware colors, help text, and actionable error messages.
  • Generates bash/zsh/fish completion scripts and benchmarks startup time against a <50ms target.
  • Enforces hard rules: support --help/--version, handle SIGINT gracefully, keep logs on stderr, never require interactive input in CI.

Who it's for

  • Backend and DevOps engineers shipping internal or open-source CLIs.
  • Developers upgrading from ad-hoc argparse scripts to proper subcommand architectures with completions.
  • Teams that need CLIs safe for pipelines and CI environments.

Example uses

  1. "Turn my deploy script into a deploy CLI with up and status subcommands and an --env flag" → commander entry point plus config and error handling.
  2. "Add a progress bar and zsh completion to my typer CLI" → pulls the Python reference and wires up rich plus completion generation.
  3. "Our CLI hangs in CI" → replaces blocking prompts with flag/env non-interactive fallbacks and TTY detection.

· · · 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 Claude 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 and clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/Jeffallan/claude-skills.git
  2. Create the skills directory: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  3. Copy this skill over: cp -r claude-skills/skills/cli-developer ~/.claude/skills/
  4. Confirm the references/ folder came along: ls ~/.claude/skills/cli-developer
  5. Restart Claude Code and try a prompt like "help me build a CLI tool" to verify the skill triggers.
View source on GitHub ↗License: MIT