Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments

The paper surveys AI agents that operate primarily through command-line terminals, defining them as systems whose main action loop involves executing terminal commands, receiving textual feedback, and interacting with a stateful environment. It introduces a seven‑dimensional terminal competence profile to link system architecture, learning, and evaluation, and highlights how behavior is jointly shaped by the model, interface, harness, runtime, and environment. The authors argue for explicit reporting of system and runtime conditions, supported by replayable traces and process‑level evidence, to better understand and benchmark terminal‑mediated agency.

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• llms
• agents
• benchmarks