When will your Agent hire an Accountant?

Polymarket launched a CLI last week, Google launched their Workspace CLI today and Flare (the AI accounting firm I cofounded) launched one 8 days ago.

As far as I know, we're the first accounting firm on Earth to launch a CLI - and we're in good company for good reason. It feels like we'll soon be selling services to agents as much as to humans and that changes a few things.

A Command-Line Interface (CLI) is a simple way to interact with software through the terminal. There's no API integration required, you just download a package and run commands to receive predictable outputs without the need to navigate any UI. OpenClaw is a good example of agents working well with CLI-based tools, where you can even extend the capabilities of the agent without pushing new code - download a new CLI package, load it into the context and you're off. If agents are going to be shopping for us in the future, this kind of interface may become an instrumental layer for companies to present their offering to the next generation of shoppers.

Why does an accounting firm need a CLI?

Devtools like AgentMail and Supabase are good examples of what happens when you build for what an agent needs rather than what a human prefers. In fact, on a recent YC podcast this whole topic even lead the partners to question whether they needed to update YC's slogan to 'Make something people agents want'...

Taking this one step further: Flare is an actual accounting firm for startups & scaleups, so it felt natural that we would soon need to impress agents as well as founders.

This lead us to launch a dedicated suite of tools geared towards agents shopping for an accounting partner. Our goal: make the purchase process easier for agents and meet them where they are.

Version 1 of this meant launching a CLI & MCP server - you can read more about these and even try them out here: withflare.co/agents.

We haven't landed any agent-led sales (yet) but in the past week, we've seen almost 100 downloads of our CLI and MCP packages as agents start to check us out. We expect this to climb in the coming months as agents become increasingly responsible for procurement inside of companies.

What happens from here?

I played with a few titles for this article - 'Is the CLI the new API' or 'Will the CLI replace SEO' - and both are probably wrong.

But there's something real here: if agents start owning more purchasing decisions, then we need to design better ways for agents to discover and evaluate services businesses.

Right now our CLI is basic. It mostly covers the information you'd find on our landing page, in an agent friendly format. Over time, you could go much deeper and it's easy to imagine the internal agents we're building at Flare to complete client work becoming sales reps - convincing other agents that their organisation would benefit from choosing Flare.

There are still big gaps in this 'agent-procurement' universe, but one thing that feels inevitable is some kind of agent-first marketplace: services in machine-readable formats, with reviews not just from humans, but from other agents about how good a provider's agents (or god forbid their humans) actually are.

I'm not holding my breadth for a sudden tsunami of accounting firms launching CLIs and at the current pace of change, this whole piece could be outdated in 45 minutes. But it's fun (and slightly surreal) to think about what it means to sell to an agent.