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

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.11999v1 Announce Type: cross 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