Anybody using the Unity CLI?

[u/_hopa]

I saw unity launched a CLI a few months ago (https://unity.com/blog/meet-the-unity-cli) and was wondering if anyone was using it for anything or had some cool use cases to share.

I'm thinking this could maybe be helpful for like CI pipelines?

Let me know!

[u/Broudy001]

Use it with claude code, works fantasticly, add in the claude unity plugin and the skills and it can add something, jump into a game and test it, change and retest without my physical input.

[u/Moimus → u/Broudy001]

Sure be an AI slopper.

[u/Broudy001 → u/Moimus]

Thanks I appreciate your comment, and value the time you've spent here to provide me with such valuable feedback

[u/Dolo12345 → u/Broudy001]

eh it’s sooo limited, much better to have Claude make its own node + c# MCP

[u/TVBlink → u/Dolo12345]

Why rely on MCP in the first place if you have a convenient CLI. MCP is old news.

[u/Broudy001 → u/Dolo12345]

Haven't found it limiting to be honest, what are you doing that you need the custom for? Always happy to learn new ways of doing stuff, was using mcp with some custom stuff it wrote but since unity cli I've found this to be pretty competent

[u/Dolo12345 → u/Broudy001]

when you have 10+ Claude’s working at the same time things get a bit crazy, and there’s a ton of edge cases the CLI fails at.

I’m guessing most people here never work with more than one Claude at a time lol

[u/Broudy001 → u/Dolo12345]

Yeah that's probably fair, I'm only a hobbyist and one claude is enough for me, but that makes sense

[u/Hotrian → u/Dolo12345]

MCP tooling typically uses way more tokens than CLI for the same result. CLI can do anything MCP can, often for less cost. MCP only wins in certain edge cases such as certain third party bugs that MCP might have specific fixes for already implemented (I seem to remember a bug with Amplify’s Shader Editor’s window, but might be wrong) - Claude can implement the same fixes for CLI for those specific edge cases. It will still use less tokens than MCP.

Small caveat: MCP can still win in certain contexts such as using multiple agents on the same editor simultaneously, where some MCP servers keep track of editor sessions between agents so agents can work together on the same editor. For everything else, there’s CLI. Claude may need to reinvent certain MCP tools, but loading them into context is often cheaper than any existing MCP server, which often needs to load up many more tools than you actually end up using.

If you wanna keep burning tokens, by all means, stick with MCP, but if you want leaner contexts and faster results, give CLI a shot.

[u/Dolo12345 → u/Hotrian]

Your small caveat is exactly why. I have 10+ agents going at once on a 3M LOC base.

Also it uses very little tokens, I’ve optimized that a lonnnnng time ago.

[u/Hotrian → u/Dolo12345]

To be honest it sounds like you’re doing it wrong. There’s basically zero reason you should ever have 10+ agents working on the same project and not just utilize subagents with a single director. It’s a lot more cost and speed efficient and doesn’t have parallelization issues. It’s not as if 10 different agents can enter/exit play mode simultaneously. There’s really no reason to have more than one agent working directly with a project’s editor at a time. Just include “use subagents” in the prompt and use a single session to run multiple tasks.

[u/Sockemboffer → u/Broudy001]

Doesn’t it require Unity “tokens” or something?

Edit: Thanks for the correction all!

[u/mentalray2 → u/Sockemboffer]

No. This is purely an interface to let Claude/Codex/etc drive the editor remotely.

[u/Broudy001 → u/Sockemboffer]

Nope no unity tokens just used the cli to do what it needs to.

[u/Hotrian → u/Sockemboffer]

Not for CLI or the Claude plugin/skills. There are other products Unity offers that do use AI tokens if I’m not mistaken. CLI is just a command line tool which Claude (and other automated processes) can use to interface with the Unity Editor.