Karpathy’s agentic engineering lifecycle, clearly explained

agents-cli is a tool designed to enhance coding assistants, enabling them to construct, assess, and deploy agents on Google Cloud. This tool does not operate as a standalone coding agent, but rather as a utility that supplies the necessary commands and skills for your preferred coding agent, such as Antigravity CLI, Claude Code, Codex, or any other coding agent. Agents-cli's core function is to build, evaluate, and deploy agents through the use of a range of commands and skills.

To use agents-cli, you must have Python 3.11 or higher, uv, and Node.js installed. Once these prerequisites are met, you can launch the Antigravity CLI, Claude Code, Codex, or any other coding agent of your choice. Then, simply instruct your coding agent to create something, for instance, a caveman-style agent that condenses lengthy text into concise technical responses. For a comprehensive guide on utilizing agents-cli, refer to the detailed tutorial provided.

Agents-cli operates independently of Google Cloud, meaning local development tasks like creation, execution, and evaluation can be carried out without a Google Cloud project. However, for deployment and cloud-related features, a Google Cloud project is necessary. While you can utilize agents-cli alongside an existing agent project, the CLI's scaffold command can also enhance your project by adding deployment and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) capabilities.

Notably, agents-cli can be used without a coding agent; the CLI functions independently, allowing direct execution of various commands from your terminal. The skills provided by agents-cli streamline the agent-building process for coding agents, but they can also be leveraged by other software engineering workflows, such as ideation, planning, code review, and more.