SecondBrain
Ask the Brain
Index/Entityupdated Sat May 09 2026 08:00:00 GMT+0800 (Philippine Standard Time)

Printing Press

toolcliagentsclaude-codemcp-alternative

Printing Press

A CLI factory + CLI library for AI agents, primarily targeting Claude Code. Two halves:

  1. Library — ~50 pre-built CLIs (ESPN, Flight Goat, Movie Goat, Recipe Goat, Linear, Amazon, Craigslist, eBay, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Hacker News, Contact Goat, Airbnb, …)
  2. Factory — a Claude Code skill that researches a target site/API and generates a Go CLI for it (~10 min per CLI in Nate's demos)

Pitch

CLIs beat MCP servers for agent ↔ tool integration because they don't pollute the agent's context window with always-loaded tool descriptions. See CLI vs API vs MCP.

Cited benchmark (uncorroborated in the source): MCP used 35× more tokens than the CLI on the same task; reliability dropped from 100% (CLI) to 72% (MCP) as tasks got harder.

Stack

  • Written in Go
  • SQLite backend per CLI (local mirror, no rate limits, no round trips)
  • Distributed via GitHub repos + Claude Code skills

People

  • Mike Van Horn — author (mvanhorn on GitHub)
  • Peter Steinberger — credited as inspiration (built gog CLI to replace Google's official gws, demonstrating that homemade CLIs can beat vendor ones). Also the creator of OpenClaw.

Status when first ingested

"Just dropped like yesterday" (per Nate Herk (AI Automation) on 2026-05-09). Very new — expect rapid catalog growth.

Sources