Designing the hf CLI as an agent-optimized way to work with the Hub
hf is the official command-line entrypoint to the Hugging Face Hub. Anything you can do on the Hub from the Python SDK, you can do from your terminal: download and upload models, datasets and Spaces; create and manage repos, branches, tags and pull requests; run Jobs on HF infrastructure; manage Buckets, Collections, webhooks and Inference Endpoints.
The hf CLI has been primarily built for our users over the years. But it’s now increasingly used by coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and more. So we rebuilt it to make it work for both audiences at once. This blog post summarizes what we did, and how we benchmarked it. We found that on complex, multi-step tasks the no-CLI baseline (an agent hand-rolling curl or the Python SDK) uses up to 6× as many tokens as the hf CLI.