I built a CLI for Ghost

Recently, I've found my preferred way to interact with lots of products is getting Claude to use a CLI tool, and then just talking to it out loud about what I want to happen.

So I made a CLI tool for Ghost, to see what it would be like in our own product - it's called ghst and it essentially makes everything in the UI available by CLI (and MCP).

Mostly this was an exercise in doing it just to see if I could - but it turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected.

We've spent 10+ years focusing on having a clean, well designed interface for Ghost. It's something we care a lot about, and spend a lot of time on.

But within about ~1hr of using Ghost via Claude/CLI, it was hard to imagine going back to caveman-clicking around a browser to get something done. Particularly for complex or compound tasks that might require visiting several different areas of the app.

The experience is so different when you're just describing what you want to happen, out loud:

"I saw this theme called [whatever], can you install that for me?"
"give a complimentary subscription to [member name]"
"how much traffic did my post get last week?"

Which is both obvious, and at the same time kind of jarring.

I know Ghost's UI extremely well, and know exactly where to go and what to click to do the thing I want – and even for me, using Claude is significantly faster/easier than clicking myself.

So how big would the delta be for a regular user who doesn't already know the UI inside out?

My initial thought was "huh, I wonder if UI even matters anymore?" - maybe everything just becomes a CLI / voice interface for a database, as various people have been suggesting about CRM tools.

But I don't think that's quite right. I notice when I interact with the product via Claude - I usually still keep the UI open, but my relationship to it is different. I use UI to see what happened, verify things look "right", and get an overview of what's going on.

Which is kind of familiar, because "agent does the actions for me / I review the results" has obvious parallels to AI coding workflows.

Before I'd be in VS Code all day doing the thing myself, but now I use Codex Desktop which is a UI designed entirely around optimising for: agent does the actions for me... I review the results.

Anyway, I don't know what my conclusion is here other than to say that AI+CLI is a really cool pattern, and I think it's likely to meaningfully influence what "UI" means over the next few years.

There are still tons of rough edges and reasons for why this is not yet a fully-formed paradigm (regular humans do not, and should not, ever need to know what "CLI" or "MCP" even means), but I like where it's going.

If you'd like to try out ghst - the beta announcement is here: