The Linear CLI Linear never shipped: driving your tracker from the terminal

If you searched for a Linear CLI, you already know the first surprise: there isn't an official one. Linear ships a hosted MCP server, a GraphQL API, and a TypeScript SDK, but no first-party command-line tool. What you find instead is a healthy little ecosystem of community CLIs, and a striking number of them were built specifically so an AI agent could drive Linear from the terminal.

That tells you something. The demand for a command line on top of an issue tracker is real, it is coming from engineers who live in the terminal, and increasingly it is coming from the agents those engineers run. This post is two things: an honest map of the Linear CLI options that exist today, and the argument for why the command line should be a first-class surface the tracker ships itself, not a wrapper you bolt on.

The Linear CLI options that actually exist

Linear's own developer surface is the GraphQL API and SDK. Everything below it on the command line is community-built. The well-known ones, as of mid-2026:

schpet/linear-cli: the most visible result, "Linear without leaving the command line." It ships a skill that helps AI agents use the CLI, which is a tell about who the audience is.

The Linear CLI options that actually exist

Linear's own developer surface is the GraphQL API and SDK. Everything below it on the command line is community-built. The well-known ones, as of mid-2026:

schpet/linear-cli: the most visible result, "Linear without leaving the command line." It ships a skill that helps AI agents use the CLI, which is a tell about who the audience is.