AXI: Agent eXperience Interface

10 design principles for building agent-ergonomic apps.

AI agents interact with external services through two dominant paradigms today: CLIs which were originally built for humans, and structured tool protocols like MCP. Both impose significant overhead.

AXI is a new paradigm - agent-native CLI tools built from 10 design principles that treat token budget as a first-class constraint.

Results

Browser Benchmark

Evaluated across 490 runs (14 tasks × 7 conditions × 5 repeats) using Claude Sonnet 4.6:

GitHub Benchmark

Evaluated across 425 runs (17 tasks × 5 conditions × 5 repeats) using Claude Sonnet 4.6:

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the model the published runs used, not a limit of the harness. Both benchmarks take --model, which is passed straight through to the agent CLI, so any Claude model works - for example --model claude-opus-4-6. Results for other models are simply not published here, and they may respond differently to output format.

Quick Start

Reference AXI implementations:

• gh-axi — GitHub operations
• chrome-devtools-axi — Browser automation

See the full AXI Catalog below for all official and community AXIs.

npm install -g gh-axi
npm install -g chrome-devtools-axi

Add to your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md:

Use `gh-axi` for GitHub and `chrome-devtools-axi` for browser automation.

The 10 Principles

These principles define what makes a CLI tool "an AXI". The table below is generated from principles.yaml; the full specification of each principle lives in the AXI skill.

AXI Catalog

The catalog tables below are generated from catalog.yaml - see CONTRIBUTING.md to add your AXI.

Official

Reference implementations maintained by the AXI project, validating the principles across different domains:

Community

AXIs built and maintained by the community: