AGENTIC-SYSTEMSApril 3, 20261 min read19 views

Terminal Agents Suffice for Enterprise Automation

Research suggests that simple terminal-based AI agents, interacting directly with APIs, can outperform complex web-based or tool-augmented agents in enterprise tasks. This finding challenges the need for high-overhead agentic architectures in favor of programmatic simplicity.

Computer Science > Software Engineering

Title:Terminal Agents Suffice for Enterprise Automation

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:There has been growing interest in building agents that can interact with digital platforms to execute meaningful enterprise tasks autonomously. Among the approaches explored are tool-augmented agents built on abstractions such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and web agents that operate through graphical interfaces. Yet, it remains unclear whether such complex agentic systems are necessary given their cost and operational overhead. We argue that a coding agent equipped only with a terminal and a filesystem can solve many enterprise tasks more effectively by interacting directly with platform APIs. We evaluate this hypothesis across diverse real-world systems and show that these low-level terminal agents match or outperform more complex agent architectures. Our findings suggest that simple programmatic interfaces, combined with strong foundation models, are sufficient for practical enterprise automation.

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Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent

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