Help flag produces usage information for every command
Why it matters
A CLI without help text is a CLI no one can use. Users land on your tool via npx mytool or pip install, type --help out of reflex, and either see nothing or see a framework-default skeleton. They close the terminal and find a competitor. Missing descriptions also break shell autocomplete hints, man-page generation, and docs scrapers that harvest --help output. This is a user-experience failure severe enough to zero out adoption regardless of how good the underlying logic is.
Severity rationale
Critical because without `--help` output the CLI is effectively undiscoverable and unusable for any new user.
Remediation
Add a description to every .command(), cobra.Command, @cli.command(), or #[command] definition, and verify --help and -h produce usage text on the root command plus every subcommand. Ship descriptions in the same file the command is registered in — for example src/cli/commands/deploy.ts:
program
.command('deploy')
.description('Deploy the current project to production')
.action(deploy)
DetectionPro
The detection method for this pattern is part of AuditBuffet Pro.
The full method (what to look for, pass and fail conditions, and how results get reported) ships inside the CLI Quality Audit. The pattern definition, severity rationale, and remediation remain openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
Taxons
History
- 2026-04-18·v1.0.0·Initial import from cli-quality·automated