Often I hear things like "When is the CLI going to die?" or "We need to kill the CLI". The first is probably fear of missing out (FOMO) while the 2nd is more likely confusion of what the problem really is.

I don't expect the CLI to die and it shouldn't need to. 1/x

What we really want is to have all information via APIs that we have available from the CLI. Most vendors aren't there yet. Especially those with a long history. The CLI doesn't need to do for you to get your API or to get consistent data. 2/x

It should be possible to have multiple consumers of the same data. That is, both GUI, CLI and API should provide the same information and the GUI would leverage APIs to provide you the information that is displayed to you.

3/x

Imagine a world without no CLI at all. You get a call at 2 AM and you need to troubleshoot a complex forwarding issue in the datacenter. Would you only want to rely upon a GUI or API in that scenario?

Let me find the right API call and the right auth method etc. 4/x

Oh no, the API changed in this new version and my call is not working any longer. I need to open a TAC case to get help with my API. I think that would be a pretty miserable experience and I can't imagine working in TAC under those circumstances. 5/x

We have different tools for different things. Just because automation is a big thing doesn't mean that we can't have CLI. Push your vendors to have feature parity between API and CLI and to write NOS where they access the same data. I suspect that's what most of you want. 6/6