cli-printing-press

CLI Printing Press

Nothing is more valuable than time and money. In a world of AI agents, that's speed and token spend. A well-designed CLI is muscle memory for an agent: no hunting through docs, no wrong turns, no wasted tokens. We built the Printing Press to print the best CLIs in the world for agents.

It reads the official API docs, studies every popular community CLI and MCP server, sniffs the web for the APIs nobody published (think Google Flights or Dominos), and applies the power-user playbook Peter Steinberger proved with discrawl and gogcli - local SQLite, compound commands, agent-native flags. It fuses all of that and prints a token-efficient Go CLI plus a Claude Code skill plus an MCP server for any API or any website.

Three CLIs printed by the press, installable today:

• ESPN (sniffed, no official API). "Tonight's NBA playoff games with live score, series state, each team's leading scorer's stat line, and any injury or lineup news from the last 24 hours." Returns everything in one call.
• flight-goat (Kayak nonstop search plus sniffed Google Flights). "Non-stop flights over 8 hours from Seattle for 4 people, Dec 24 to Jan 1, cheapest first." Two sources stitched into one query.
• linear-pp-cli (50ms against a local SQLite mirror). "Every blocked issue whose blocker has been stuck for a week." Compound queries the API can't answer.

Browse the full catalog of printed CLIs at printingpress.dev or in the Printing Press Library, organized by category, most with full MCP servers.

Cursor users: see docs/CURSOR.md for how to install a printed CLI, attach the matching skill, handle auth, and choose CLI vs MCP when your repo does not already document a workflow.

Install

You need both the binary and the Claude Code skills. The skills (/printing-press <app>) are the primary interface; they drive the binary behind the scenes.

The binary alone works (research, generation, verification, scoring) but skips the curated agent loop. The skills alone have nothing to call. Install both.

Prerequisites: Go 1.26.3 or newer and Claude Code. The skills are tested with Claude Code; other harnesses like Codex may work but aren't tested. Use Claude Code for the best experience.

1. Install the binary

go install github.com/mvanhorn/cli-printing-press/v4/cmd/printing-press@latest

Verify with printing-press --version. If go install fails, confirm Go 1.26.3 or newer is installed and $GOPATH/bin is on your PATH.

2. Install the skills — pick one path

Recommended: clone the repo. Simplest, gets you the bleeding edge as it ships, and git pull is your update mechanism.

git clone https://github.com/mvanhorn/cli-printing-press.git

gh skill install mvanhorn/cli-printing-press --agent claude-code --scope user
gh skill update                                # update later

npx skills add mvanhorn/cli-printing-press/skills -g -a claude-code -y
npx skills update                              # update later

3. Start a printing session

If you cloned the repo, run from the repo root:

claude --plugin-dir .          # load this repo's skills directly
claude --plugin-dir . -w       # ...in a new git worktree (parallel runs)

If you installed skills only, run claude from any folder.

Then inside Claude Code:

/printing-press <app-name>

For example: