Researchers gave AI agents the keys to every app

What if your AI assistant could open Blender, render a 3D scene, edit a photo in GIMP, and export a PDF from LibreOffice — all without you touching a single button? That's exactly what CLI-Anything does, and it just crossed 19,200 GitHub stars in under two weeks.

Built by the Data Intelligence Lab at Hong Kong University, CLI-Anything solves a problem every AI developer has hit: AI agents can't use graphical software. They can write code and search the web, but ask them to edit an image in Photoshop or trim audio in Audacity? They're stuck.

How it turns any app into an AI-controllable tool

CLI-Anything runs a fully automated 7-step pipeline that scans a program's source code, maps every button and menu to an underlying function, then generates a complete command-line interface (CLI — the text-based way to control software by typing commands instead of clicking).

The key distinction: it calls the real software engine, not a simplified copy. When your AI agent renders in Blender through CLI-Anything, Blender's actual rendering engine does the work. When it exports from LibreOffice, you get a real document — not a recreation.

What this looks like in practice

Imagine telling your AI: "Create a quarterly report with charts, render the cover image in 3D, and export everything as a PDF." With CLI-Anything installed, the agent can chain commands across LibreOffice, Blender, and GIMP to do exactly that.

Here's what AI-controlled Blender looks like:

cli-anything-blender project new --width 1920 --height 1080
cli-anything-blender mesh add --type cube --location "0,0,1"
cli-anything-blender render --output render.png --samples 128

Or audio cleanup in Audacity:

cli-anything-audacity project open --file podcast.wav
cli-anything-audacity effect noise-reduction --sensitivity 12
cli-anything-audacity export --format mp3 --bitrate 192

The CLI-Hub: an 'app store' for AI-controlled software

On March 17, the team launched CLI-Hub — a central registry where you can browse, search, and install any generated CLI with a single pip command. Think of it as an app store, but instead of apps for humans, it's apps for AI agents.

Every CLI also ships with a SKILL.md file — a machine-readable description that tells AI agents exactly what the software can do and how to use it. This means agents can discover new capabilities automatically.

Who this changes things for

Why it's trending now

The project launched March 8 and hit 13,400 stars in just 6 days — one of the fastest-growing GitHub repositories this month. It's now at 19,200 stars and climbing. The timing makes sense: as AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor become mainstream, the bottleneck has shifted from "can AI write code?" to "can AI actually use software?"

CLI-Anything answers that with a definitive yes — and it's completely free under the MIT license.

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