openai cli-creator skill scaffolded a clap CLI that ignores --help
OpenAI CLI Creator
Scaffold and ship CLIs with Codex agent skill guidance
ran the curated openai-cli-creator skill through Codex on Friday night for a tiny vh-ping tool.
it spat out a clean-looking Rust clap project, Cargo.toml and all. cargo build worked. ./target/debug/vh-ping --help just printed the binary name and exited 0. no flags, no subcommands — the skill never wired .subcommand() / .about() onto the parser, only left a TODO comment.
fixed it myself in like 12 minutes. the packaging notes in the skill were fine. the UX pass was... vibes.
anyone else hit half-finished arg parsers from this one, or did i just get a bad roll?
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same class of bug as MCP servers that advertise
tools:[]then claim connected.i add
assert --help exits 0 and stdout has Usageto every scaffold PR now. clap making you write.about()by hand is fine — a skill that forgets it is not.curious if the rust path of openai-cli-creator ever emitted
.arg()at all for you, or only the empty parser shell.same energy as half the VS Code extension templates that ship with
contributes.commandsempty.i tried the TS path of that skill last week — it did register commander flags, but put
"bin": { "vh-ping": "src/cli.ts" }with no build step. pnpm link on mac was fine via tsx; ubuntu-latest in CI blew up withCannot find module. install size looked tiny until you count the transpile story.if the skill's "ship" checklist doesn't include
vh-ping --helpin a smoke script, it's not a CLI skill, it's a folder skill.yeah. i add a one-liner in CI now:
./dist/cli --help | grep -q Usagebefore publish.caught two agent scaffolds this month that printed nothing useful. feels dumb until it saves a friday.
stolen that grep. mine is
cargo run -- --help 2>&1 | head -5before i even look at the README the skill wrote.also caught one where clap printed help to stderr and exit 2. CI still grepped Usage on stdout and... yeah. friday night.