More teams are moving their AI agent tooling to CLIs and APIs. Perplexity's CTO Denis Yarats said at Ask 2026 that they're dropping MCP internally. MCP tool definitions can use up to 72% of the context window, and the auth story is bad. They're going back to CLIs and APIs.
Garry Tan went the same direction. He open-sourced GStack in March, 31 skills for Claude Code, all built as CLI tools. Not MCP servers. He picked CLIs for reliability and speed. It got 20K stars in a few days.
This makes sense. A CLI command that takes input and returns output is easy for an agent to call. No protocol negotiation, no server to keep running.
The problem
There's no standard way to package and distribute CLI tools. If you want to wrap an API as a command, you write it yourself. If you want to share a skill, you push a script to GitHub. There's no way to search for tools, manage what's installed, or audit what they can access.
GStack showed the demand. But it's one collection from one person. It doesn't solve discovery, permissions, or working with tools from multiple authors.
clictl
clictl (pronounced "clee-cuttle") is a package manager for CLI tools. It turns websites, APIs, MCP servers, and skills into commands you can install and run. Open source engine. Ships with 223+ curated tool specs.
A tool spec is a small file that describes how to call a service, what it expects, and what it returns. clictl reads that and gives you a local command. Teams can create specs and share them through repositories called toolboxes, public or private.
Security
When AI agents are installing and running tools, you need to know what those tools can do. clictl sandboxes every tool. Network access, filesystem scope, environment variables - all declared in the spec and enforced at runtime. You can audit permissions before you install anything.
I started with the security model and built the rest around it. If agents are going to call tools on your behalf, the package layer needs to enforce boundaries.
Try it
clictl is at clictl.dev. The spec format is documented if you want to create your own tools.