Every command in the family draws its output and asks its questions differently depending on who’s on the other end. That decision is made once per run and used everywhere: prompts, spinners, table color, and the shape of an error.

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How the CLI decides

The CLI treats you as a human only when all of these hold:
  • The requested output format is table (not json or yaml — if you passed --json, you’re treated as an agent even at a terminal).
  • stdin is a TTY — an interactive terminal, not a pipe or a redirected file.
  • stdout is a TTY, the same way.
  • None of CLI_AGENT, CLAUDECODE, or CI is set in the environment (checked with a truthy test: unset, empty, 0 and false all count as not set).
Anyone who fails any of those checks is an “agent” for this run — which covers a real script, a CI job, and a coding agent that runs commands through a non-interactive shell, even one with both streams technically attached to a pseudo-terminal (pty). That’s why the family documents CLI_AGENT=1: it’s the one signal an agent can set for itself when its shell does look like a terminal.

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What each audience gets

  • Tables instead of JSON, colored by the shared theme (see below).
  • A picker when a required argument is missing — edstem threads with no unit prompts a select populated from your own units, not a “missing required argument” error.
  • threads send prompts for --title and opens $EDITOR for the body when neither --body nor --body-file is given.
  • A y/N confirmation before any mutation, instead of requiring --yes.
  • Spinners for long-running steps, drawn on stderr so stdout stays clean even if you’re piping this particular run for some other reason.
  • A guided first-run sign-in the first time a command needs a session and finds none — moodle shows a wordmark, explains what’s about to happen, and offers a menu of sign-in methods (your own browser, a CLI-controlled browser, or pasting a cookie) that comes back after a failed attempt instead of exiting.

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The shared color roles

When color is on, every CLI paints four roles consistently, so the meaning transfers between tools: Status words (overdue, graded, not started, announcement, and similar) are colored by meaning rather than by column: overdue reads as danger (red), graded as success (green), not started as muted (dim), announcement as accent (magenta), regardless of which product or which column they appear in. A negated word like “not graded” is checked before the positive form it contains, so it doesn’t get misread as success. None of this shows up in a pipe or with NO_COLOR set — the exact same text renders with no escape codes at all, so grepping a piped table works the same as parsing its JSON.

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Escapes for a prompt that can’t run

Some interactive prompts have a non-interactive equivalent built in, for exactly the case where an agent needs the data a prompt would collect but can’t answer one:
  • A masked password prompt, used for a token, throws without a terminal; the calling command offers a --token-stdin style flag instead — edstem auth login --token-stdin reads the token from the first line of stdin.
  • An editor prompt, used for a post body, throws without a terminal; the calling command offers a --body-file style flag instead — edstem replies send ... --body-file - reads the body from stdin, or a path reads from that file. $VISUAL or $EDITOR is what opens when a person runs the same command interactively without either flag.

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Ctrl+C

Cancelling an interactive prompt — Ctrl+C or Escape — is treated as the person’s decision, not a failure: it produces a cancelled error and exit code 130, the same convention a shell uses for a process killed by a signal.

Errors and exit codes

The full exit-code table, including 130 for cancellation.