CollabOpsBlog

CollabOps CLI Tour — The Whole Product on One Screen

A GUI demo takes *5–10 minutes*. A CLI tour takes *30 seconds*. The CLI is the fastest way to convey our product's mental model.

John Baek
John Baek
Founder, CollabOps
CollabOps CLI Tour — The Whole Product on One Screen

A GUI demo runs 5–10 minutes. A CLI tour runs 30 seconds. The fastest delivery of CollabOps's mental model isn't the GUI — it's the CLI.

This post walks the six commands that show the whole product on one screen.

1 — collab init — new project

$ collab init
✓ Detected git remote: github.com/acme/payment-api
✓ Created project: acme/payment-api
? Pipeline template? (use arrow keys)
  ❯ basic-ci
    docker-build
    full-deploy
    custom...

Auto-detect git repo. Pick template. Two seconds.

2 — collab plan — preview a change

$ collab plan deploy --env staging
[plan]
  - Build: payment-api:v2.4.7
    estimated time: 4m 12s
    artifacts: 2 (docker image, deploy manifest)
  
  - Deploy: payment-api → staging
    target: 3 pods → 3 pods
    config changes: ENABLE_NEW_VALIDATOR=true (added)
  
  - Required permissions:
    ✓ deploy.staging.acme/payment-api
  
  - Affected: 47 active sessions (estimated)

What will happen — preview. Permission check. Impact estimate. Not yet executed.

3 — collab apply — execute

$ collab apply
[1/3] Build payment-api:v2.4.7         [4:12]  ✓
[2/3] Deploy to staging                  [1:45]  ✓
[3/3] Verify deployment                  [0:30]  ✓
Done in 6m 27s
  audit_id: audit-2026-05-27-1729-x9k3
  
View: https://app.collabops.ai/audit/audit-2026-05-27-1729-x9k3

audit_id records every action. That ID enables graph queries.

4 — collab who — show your permissions

$ collab who
john.baek@collabops.ai

Active permissions:
  ┌─ deploy.staging.* (all projects)
  │  granted by: woojin.jung@collabops.ai (CTO)
  │  scope: env=staging
  │  expires: never
  │
  ├─ deploy.production.acme/* (acme org only)
  │  granted by: woojin.jung@collabops.ai
  │  scope: env=production, window: 09:00-18:00 KST
  │  expires: 2026-08-31
  │
  └─ admin.audit.* (read-only)
     granted by: system (founder default)

Total active permissions: 3
Most recent permission change: 2026-04-12 (added deploy.production)

The permission graph in one screen. → Permission model on a graph

5 — collab why — trace a decision

$ collab why deploy/staging-2026-05-27-1729
Deploy: staging-2026-05-27-1729

Triggered by:
  ▸ john.baek@collabops.ai (manual)
  ▸ via PR #4823 merge
  ▸ which closed Issue COH-2891 ("Add new payment validator")
  ▸ which was created by yuntaeoh@collabops.ai on 2026-05-19

Build artifact:
  payment-api:v2.4.7 (sha256:af16...)
  signed by: build-system (FIPS-140-3 module)

Result:
  3/3 pods healthy
  rollback in: 0
  verification tests: 47 passed, 0 failed

Causal graph in five lines. During incidents, this single command turns 30 minutes of investigation into 30 seconds.

6 — collab agent — invoke an AI agent

$ collab agent "diagnose payment success rate drop"

Agent: diagnostic-v2 (Claude Sonnet)
Working...

Found 3 hypotheses:
  1. New deploy 3h ago changed payment validator
     confidence: 0.87
  2. External API slowdown (issuer X)
     confidence: 0.34
  3. Database connection pool saturation
     confidence: 0.12

Investigation plan ready. Approve to execute?
[y/N]

The agent only diagnoses + hypothesizes. Execution requires human approval. → Agent authority boundary

Six commands is the whole thing

These six commands convey 90% of our product's mental model. Each shows one face of the graph:

  • init — project = graph node
  • plan — change = preview of edge addition
  • apply — edge addition + execution
  • who — human edges
  • why — edge traversal (causality)
  • agent — agent edges (same graph as humans)

For an engineer seeing CollabOps for the first time, this 30-second CLI tour conveys our model more precisely than a 5-minute GUI demo. Run the six commands above yourself and the mental model is complete.

Tags#cli#product#demo#devops

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