What if CLIs exposed machine-readable contracts for AI agents?

This project was inspired by a tweet from Guillermo Rauch referencing the article “Rewrite your CLI for AI agents”.

The idea is simple: most CLIs were designed for humans reading terminal output. AI agents interacting with tools need something closer to a machine-readable contract.

Sonde is an early experiment exploring a small manifest that lets tools describe their commands, inputs and outputs so agents can discover and execute them without scraping terminal output.

This is still very early and I'm mainly interested in feedback from people building developer tooling or agent workflows.