# Agent-Computer Interface

> Design tools for LLM agents specifically — not for humans at a keyboard — with context-budget-aware affordances.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Tool Use & Environment
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/agent_computer_interface/

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## Description
**Intent**: Build a tool surface optimized for how agents reason, not how humans type.

**Context**: You're shipping a coding or research agent that drives a shell, file system, or web page originally built for humans. The agent burns context budget fast on noisy raw output and lacks the quick visual scan a human uses to orient.

**Solution**: Design agent-specific tools: a file viewer that shows windowed slices with line numbers, an edit tool that reruns the linter and returns the diff, a shell that returns structured stdout/stderr/exit-code, a search that filters and ranks. Every tool signature and return type is tuned for the agent's context budget and reasoning style.


## Use Cases
- Off-the-shelf human tools (bash, vim, browsers) overwhelm the agent with noise.
- You can afford to build and maintain a curated, agent-specific tool surface.
- You measure agent performance and want the tool layer to be a tunable variable.





## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Measurable accuracy gains over human-CLI tools on the same tasks.

- Each tool's design is explicit and inspectable — no magic.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Two interface surfaces to keep in sync: one for humans, one for the agent.

- ACI design is empirical — expect several iterations before it's right.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/agent-computer-interface/)