Is Bash All You Need?
Interesting paper from Microsoft.
If you are deciding which tools to give an enterprise agent, you might want to check this out.
(bookmark it)
They compared five tool interfaces on TheAgentCompany and APEX-Agents with Opus-4.8 and GPT-5.5. The options range from a catalog of typed tools, to bash alone, to programmatic tool calling where the agent writes code against a fixed catalog.
Bash alone scored 21.8 to 24.5 points higher than typed tools on TheAgentCompany and 4.8 to 7.4 points higher on APEX-Agents, while using 19% to 72% fewer tokens. Adding typed tools or agent-written tools on top of bash gave no measurable gain.
The authors recommend bash when execution can be sandboxed, and programmatic tool calling when compliance requires a fixed tool list.