You and your agents

Two tasters at one bench. The same charly surface serves you at the keyboard and your agents driving the line, with no second-class channel for either. Built for you and your agents, in the same breath.

— tenet 4

The idea

Tools that grow an agent story usually grow a second, smaller surface for it — a handful of endpoints wrapping the parts someone judged safe to automate. That surface then lags: it is maintained separately, it lacks the newest verbs, and the agent ends up shelling out anyway.

Here there is one surface. The charly binary is also an MCP server, and every leaf command is exposed as an MCP tool by reflection over the same command model the CLI uses. Nothing is hand-listed, so nothing can lag: a new verb is reachable over RPC the moment it exists.

That symmetry is what makes the rest of this site’s claims hold for both readers. When a page says “prove it on a disposable bed”, the agent runs the identical command you would — same verbs, same exit codes, same output. There is no automation dialect to learn and no capability that exists only at the keyboard.

Authoring is part of the same surface, and it is the part that matters most for an agent. Editing YAML by regenerating it destroys comments and key order; charly’s editor verbs go through the YAML node API instead, so a machine edit leaves a human-authored file intact.

In practice

Expose the whole CLI over RPC. mcp is an out-of-process command plugin, discovered from a project’s candy/plugin-mcp rather than compiled in — so point charly at a project that provides it. --repo does that without a checkout:

charly --repo opencharly/charly mcp serve               # Streamable HTTP or stdio
charly --repo opencharly/charly mcp serve --read-only   # filters the destructive tools out

The verb set is not fixed at build time. Run against a project without that candy and the verb simply is not there.

Author a candy the way an agent would — the same verbs you would use by hand, with comments and key order preserved across every edit:

charly box new project my-project
charly -C my-project box new candy my-tool
charly -C my-project candy add-rpm my-tool ripgrep
charly -C my-project candy set my-tool env.MY_VAR value
charly -C my-project box new box my-shell --base fedora --candy my-tool
charly -C my-project box validate

-C names the project every verb acts on, so nothing depends on which directory you are standing in. --repo is the read-only counterpart: it resolves a published project into a cache, which is right for reading and wrong for editing — a scaffold written to your project is invisible to it.

And when the agent wants to know whether its change worked, it runs what you would run:

charly --repo opencharly/distro-fedora check run check-tutorial-shell

See also

• The charly CLI — the command surface and how plugins serve it.
• The MCP command — the gateway in detail.
• The spec is the test — what an agent grades against.