Overview
Steve Yegge describes how he built the Beads CLI tool using an unusual approach: instead of designing a traditional interface, he turned AI agent hallucinations into real features by implementing whatever the agents tried to do. This resulted in a complex 100+ command interface designed specifically for AI agents rather than humans.
The Breakdown
- Desire Paths design methodology - Yegge spent 4 months observing how AI agents naturally tried to interact with his Beads tool and implemented those attempted interactions as real features
- Agent-first interface design - The resulting CLI has 100+ subcommands with many sub-subcommands, aliases, and alternate syntaxes specifically tailored to how AI agents think and operate
- Hallucination-to-reality implementation - Rather than fighting AI agent mistakes, Yegge made their ‘wrong’ guesses correct by building the functionality they expected to find
- Reduced prompting requirements - Because the interface matches agent expectations, users need much less detailed prompting to get agents to successfully use Beads