What is the status of this? Seriously, the lack of support for running workflows in the CLI makes the entire feature pretty much useless.
Why the eye roll? 
Well, the forum software encouraged me to welcome you back, and then I read your message, which I thought was a bit negative and demanding. This “useless” system is still somebody’s work, and they’re probably pretty proud of it 
.
Maybe I’ve spend too long on Twitter, and every time I see a sardonic “seriously?” from an angry SWE, I find I need another screen break 
(Just a CircleCI user, and pro bono philosopher).
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While I agree that we do need support for testing workflows in the CLI (among other things), I think the original post could have been a bit more tactful.
We are all software developers. We all pour our hearts and souls into our products, and if you’ve been around long enough, especially on larger projects, tiny features often require immense amounts of work to actually complete.
It isn’t just about slapping some code together…you need to verify your code functions properly, write automated tests, have it code reviewed, iterate over CR/PR comments and change requests, test it in pre-release environments, vet the feature to make sure it won’t impact any existing behavior that your customers (which may number in the thousands, or even tens of thousands…or even millions) may rely heavily upon, then get final buy-in from product owners that everything is indeed G2G and safe for public use before you do a final deployment to a production environment. (Or something along those lines.)
If anything along this chain goes wrong, then you tend to get kicked back to step one…or features may even be shelved, temporarily or indefinitely, if other priorities come up or there is a detrimental impact to existing functionality your customers depend on.
Tiny changes to BIG projects used by immense user bases are usually not as simple as they may seem…
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I’m well aware of the complexities of delivering a production product. However, let’s be honest. The CLI tool is not useful in its current form. Surely the CircleCI devs know this. I’m just trying to get someone to give us a status update. They haven’t said a word about this topic in over a year. A lot of businesses pay them a lot of money for their service (my employer included) and I think the least they can do is let us know what is going on from time to time.
This may be part of the problem I think I am identifying. There are a plenty of ways of justifying tactless remarks, and an appeal to “honesty” is one of the most popular ones - after all, didn’t our parents teach us to tell the truth? It is hard to argue against.
Here also is a plea to the readership for “us” to be honest, which carries the implication that everyone would agree with you, if only we were not so bashful about plain speaking. Indeed, your view is so correct that CircleCI engineers “know” it too, and we are invited to consider that they would be lying if they stated otherwise.
I sometimes reflect that our subconscious minds are pretty darn clever at working out how to use speech to manipulate people, that we do it even without being conscious of all the psychological strings we end up pulling.
Indeed. And as soon as we pay anyone for anything, we believe we have purchased the right to speak to our suppliers how we choose, ranging from slightly terse remarks to outright abuse. The subconscious mind again has a purpose here - faced with a frustration, it feels that it is appropriate to subject someone to a psychological injury that is commensurate with the scale of the perceived infraction.
The dilemma we are faced with is that in veering away from respectful dialogue, we are appointing ourselves judge, jury and jailer. While there might be societal agreement that some suppliers really are dreadful, or that some people do genuinely deserve to feel bad for terrible behaviour, there are no checks and balances. In effect, we have found a sneaky way to bop someone on the nose and get away with it (which our egos are fine with, because “they deserved it”, right?).
Well, this is a bit petulant too, isn’t it? Another bop on the nose, this time with an appeal to duty. To be fair, I do agree that being kept informed is a good thing, and surely it is something that all companies can get better at. But the difficulty here is that a concrete suggestion is marred by the bop, and if I were an employee, I’d not be minded to respond to it at all.
(No feelings were harmed in the writing of this post 
)
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Hah well I hate to resuscitate this discussion, but I personally would find the cli useful (yes, even in its current state) if I could get it to work. Frankly I don’t know what the output is supposed to look like or how to debug or … well anything about it, tbh.
It fails here every time, in the same way. I installed it with brew (eg brew install circleci)
====>> install circle dependencies
#!/bin/bash -eo pipefail
./bin/ci/install
/bin/bash: ./bin/ci/install: No such file or directory
Error: Exited with code 127
Step failed
Basically I’m trying to debug key commands not working in CircleCI in Firefox (selenium) while they work fine locally. If I could repro the issue locally maybe I could figure out some updates to the config that would make it work.