Terminal Agents: A Survey of AI Agents in Command-Line Environments

Abstract

arXiv:2608.20485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly act through terminals, yet existing surveys disperse terminal-mediated behavior across software engineering, tool use, and computer-use research. We regard terminal agents as systems whose dominant progress-bearing action--observation loop is mediated by terminal command execution, textual feedback, and stateful environment interaction. Using terminal-mediated execution as an organizing lens, this survey est