CLI-Anything: Turn ANY App into a CLI for Claude Code & Codex (GIMP, Blender, LibreOffice & More!)

Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/@aicodeking/join In this video, I'll show you CLI-Anything, an open-source project from HKUDS at the University of Hong Kong that gives any piece of software a command line interface your AI agent can use. I explain why a CLI with JSON output beats screenshot-based GUI automation, APIs and rewrites, and how it calls the real app instead of a toy copy. Then I show CLI-Hub, the package manager for ready-made CLIs, and the meta-skill that lets your agent find and install the right tool by itself. After that, I go through the CLI generator plugin in Claude Code and its seven phases, and we try the generated CLIs for GIMP, LibreOffice and Blender, plus the refine, test and validate commands. Finally, I cover HARNESS.md, the tests, the demos and the limitations. -- Key Takeaways: 🚀 CLI-Anything takes the source code of an app like GIMP or Blender and has your coding agent build a full CLI for it, with tests, docs and a skill file. 🌟 It comes from HKUDS, the lab behind LightRAG, has more than 54,000 stars and is fully open source under Apache 2.0. 💻 Every command has a help page and a --json flag, so the agent gets clean JSON instead of clicking on pixels. ✅ It calls the real software: LibreOffice makes a real PDF in headless mode and Blender renders with real Blender. 📦 CLI-Hub is a package manager for these CLIs: pip install cli-anything-hub, then list, search, install, info and launch. 🧠 The CLI-Hub meta-skill lets Claude Code, Codex and other agents find, install and use the right CLI on their own, like the Draw.io CLI for a diagram. 🔀 The generator plugin runs seven phases: Analyze, Design, Implement, Plan Tests, Write Tests, Document and Publish. 🔍 The refine command fills the gaps in a CLI, and the tests check real output files and fail instead of skipping when the app is missing. ⚠️ It needs a frontier-class model, uses a lot of tokens, works best with source code, and often needs a few refine runs. 👍 Verdict: a really good idea, and I would install the free CLI-Hub meta-skill first, then try the generator on apps that are not in the hub.