I built a manifest standard for agent-callable CLI tools – 93.6% routing accuracy, zero fine-tuning

Jimmy — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:21:11 +0000

I've been building agentic systems and kept running into the same problem:
agents either stuff entire tool docs into every prompt, or hallucinate
the wrong tool entirely.

CLI tools are 10–32× cheaper than MCP and nearly 100% reliable — but
there's no standard way for agents to discover and invoke them.

So I built CLIbrary: an open standard where each CLI tool has a
manifest.json with intent_triggers — natural language phrases
describing when to use it.

A routing layer does nearest-neighbor search over these embeddings
and returns a ready-to-execute tool call.

Results

Validated on 1,380 test cases using multilingual-e5-base, zero fine-tuning:

Overall accuracy: 93.6%
All 8 categories above 90%

Current state

69 manifests across 8 categories (ai-ml, devops, data, web, security,
media, productivity, finance). Schema and metadata only right now —
no CLI implementations yet. This is the standard layer first.

Manifest example

{
  "name": "sql-runner",
  "category": "data",
  "intent_triggers": [
    "query a database",
    "run a SQL statement",
    "get data from postgres"
  ]
}

Looking for feedback

Does the manifest schema make sense for your use case?
What CLIs or categories would you want to see first?
Is anyone else building tooling for agent tool discovery? Would love to connect.

GitHub: https://github.com/clibrary-hub/manifests

DEV Community: Jimmy

I built a manifest standard for agent-callable CLI tools – 93.6% routing accuracy, zero fine-tuning

Results

Current state

Manifest example

Looking for feedback