Mr. Sudo will make you a sandwich. The future has arrived! DoorDash has introduced a limited beta of DoorDash CLI, a command-line tool for developers that lets you order DoorDash directly from your AI agent. The company says the tool can be used to locate stores, find deals, and check out.
The new tool, called “dd-cli,” is available to macOS developers in the U.S. and Canada through a waiting list, DoorDash co-founder and CTO Andy Fang said in a post on X. DoorDash was asked for comment on this new feature.
The reason this announcement is attracting so much attention is because it’s pretty interesting at first glance. Command line tools are about programming, not about ordering lunch. Commanding an AI agent to order a salad or sandwich may seem a bit absurd at first.
But the DoorDash CLI is actually no joke. This is an example of what agent commerce looks like.
The move will allow the company to open DoorDash’s ordering platform to AI agents, allowing developers to add functionality to their own software and services. This means that instead of accessing DoorDash’s apps, developers can build their own tools for ordering food and groceries or finding local lunch deals, and use those features as building blocks to combine with other tools.
DoorDash has also been experimenting with offering services via iMessage and has now introduced its own AI chatbot, Ask DoorDash, providing two examples of how agent commerce can work. We also expose our services to AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Claude.
The company’s sign-up form for access to the new CLI tool includes a field asking developers what they would build if the beta is allowed.
There’s a bit of humor in this announcement, reminding me of the old XKCD comic about programmers automating silly tasks like making sandwiches. In this comic, the programmer says, “Make me a sandwich,” and the other person replies, “What? Make it yourself,” so the programmer says, “sudo make me a sandwich,” and the other person says, “OK.” (This is programming humor, right?)
The video attached to X’s post leans into the overengineering angle of reading Slack, recalling memory, parsing JSON, inspecting menu structure, running Python scripts, recovering from errors, and calculating totals to do something as simple as order three salads. Once the task is executed, the interface will display “Flibbertigibbeting”, making the whole thing even more interesting.
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