AgentMeter: Evaluating Model-CLI Matching for CLI-Based Local Task-Solving Agents
For practitioners deploying LLM agents, this work demonstrates that model-CLI matching is critical and should be evaluated jointly, not separately.
LLM agents solving local tasks via CLI are evaluated as model-CLI pairs, not models alone. AgentMeter benchmark with AgentMeter Score (AMS) shows that model and CLI choices interact significantly, with different deployment criteria selecting different configurations (e.g., highest AMS selects Qwen3.6+ with kimi-cli).
LLM agents increasingly solve local tasks through command-line and CLI-based harness interfaces, including code editing, repository inspection, data analysis, and file workflows. Existing evaluations often emphasize task success, but deployed local agents are not models alone: the CLI mediates prompts, context replay, tool outputs, file access, terminal observations, and stopping behavior. As a result, the same model can produce different success, token, and cost profiles under different CLIs. We introduce AGENTMETER, a benchmark for evaluating model-CLI matching in CLI-mediated local task-solving agents, together with AgentMeter Score (AMS), a success-anchored, cost-aware metric over calibrated task-effort tiers. AgentMeter uses Benchmark90 as the full validation set and Core30 as a lower-cost subset for expanded comparison across 24 complete model-CLI configurations. On Core30, common deployment criteria select different configurations: highest Pass/30 selects GLM-5.1 with qwen-coder, lowest Tok./Pass selects GPT-5.3-Codex with kimi-cli, lowest billable USD/Pass selects Qwen3.6+ with Codex, while highest AMS selects Qwen3.6+ with kimi-cli. Benchmark90 validation preserves the Top-1 configuration and Top-3 set, with Spearman correlation 0.765, Kendall correlation 0.567, and AMS MAE 0.0383. These results show that model choice and CLI choice should not be decoupled, and that model-CLI configurations should be evaluated as the deployed unit.