Is Bash All You Need? An Empirical Study of Tool Interfaces for Enterprise Digital Worker Agents

2026-09-09

AI Summary

研究对比了五种工具界面在企业任务中的表现，发现单独使用bash优于专门工具，解决企业工作中多应用协调问题。

Abstract

In this study, we examine whether a general shell can outperform specialized tools on enterprise tasks. Shell-based agents have shown strong results in coding, but enterprise work also involves moving between applications and services, coordinating with coworkers, and performing professional analysis. We compare five tool interfaces on TheAgentCompany and APEX-Agents using Opus-4.8 and GPT-5.5: typed tools, typed tools plus bash, bash alone, bash with persistent agent-synthesized tools, and programmatic tool calling (PTC), which runs programs whose actions are restricted to a typed tool catalog. Bash alone outperforms typed tools on both benchmarks, improving score by 21.8-24.5 pp on TheAgentCompany and 4.8-7.4 pp on APEX-Agents while using 19-72% fewer total tokens. Adding typed tools or persistent tool synthesis to bash produces no detectable pooled score gain. PTC uses fewer tokens than direct typed calls with broadly similar task performance, but generally underperforms bash alone in both quality and cost efficiency. For enterprise practitioners, these results favor bash alone when arbitrary execution can be isolated and PTC when security or compliance policies require a fixed tool catalog.

Problem

• Bash
• Enterprise Tasks
• Tool Interfaces
• Agent Performance
• Specialized Tools

Innovation

• Bash
• enterprise tasks
• programmatic tool calling (PTC)
• token efficiency
• security and compliance