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Patrice Bechard, Orlando Marquez Ayala, Emily Chen, Jordan Skelton, Sagar Davasam, Srinivas Sunkara, Vikas Yadav, Sai Rajeswar
There has been growing interest in building agents that can interact with digital platforms to execute meaningful enterprise tasks autonomously. Among the approaches explored are tool-augmented agents built on abstractions such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and web agents that operate through graphical interfaces. Yet, it remains unclear whether such complex agentic systems are necessary given their cost and operational overhead. We argue that a coding agent equipped only with a terminal and a filesystem can solve many enterprise tasks more effectively by interacting directly with platform APIs. We evaluate this hypothesis across diverse real-world systems and show that these low-level terminal agents match or outperform more complex agent architectures. Our findings suggest that simple programmatic interfaces, combined with strong foundation models, are sufficient for practical enterprise automation.
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@article{bechard2026terminal,
title = {Terminal Agents Suffice for Enterprise Automation},
author = {Patrice Bechard and Orlando Marquez Ayala and Emily Chen and Jordan Skelton and Sagar Davasam and Srinivas Sunkara and Vikas Yadav and Sai Rajeswar},
year = {2026},
abstract = {There has been growing interest in building agents that can interact with digital platforms to execute meaningful enterprise tasks autonomously. Among the approaches explored are tool-augmented agents built on abstractions such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and web agents that operate through graphical interfaces. Yet, it remains unclear whether such complex agentic systems are necessary given their cost and operational overhead. We argue that a coding agent equipped only with a terminal and a},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00073},
keywords = {cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL},
eprint = {2604.00073},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}