Terminal Agents Are the Future - We're Launching mint new

Terminal agents are becoming the default way developers get work done. Today we are launching mint new which brings Mintlify to that workflow by letting you create a docs site from your terminal in seconds. Pick a location and a theme, then run mint dev to preview. No dashboard login required.

With this release you can start your docs where you work in the terminal. Run npx mint new, choose where it lives, choose a theme, and get a live preview with mint dev.

Making Mintlify maximally accessible to agents

I subscribe to the definition of an LLM agent as something that runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal. Much consternation among AI engineers goes into "picking the right tools for the loop." Terminal agents are the silver bullet for all this needless thinking.

Once your LLM is running inside your terminal, it can use the bash tool and run generic CLI commands to get what it needs. My terminal has all of my tools, find, grep, cat, head, tail, sed, awk, echo, mint, and many more. The team behind Claude Code followed KISS by instructing the agent to use these tools instead of inventing new ones and built a category-defining product.

All of us software developers at Mintlify are using terminal agents daily and felt the need for an enhanced CLI firsthand. I know mint new is a relatively trivial feature to be doing marketing around, but we want to be loud about the fact that we are going to be improving the CLI in the coming weeks.

Why new and not init?

I put up a pull request for this feature, linked it in our engineering Slack channel asking "can we merge?" and the only question I got back was from our CEO, who asked why I chose new as the command.

My take is that init feels too heavy since it's used for creating entire applications, packages, or libraries, and Mintlify is intentionally supposed to be lighter. We are trying to help you "buy" instead of "build", and new brings more of that feeling.

I try to avoid bikeshedding on things like this, but for a feature so small I think it's kind of fun that we put that extra bit of personal touch in.

Some other fun details

All mint new is doing under the hood is cloning our starter kit into the folder where you run the command. Some people will be running it in a place where they want the docs to become a subfolder in a monorepo, while others will be starting fresh. We interactively give you the choice!

Once you decide on overwriting or using a subdirectory, we continue to let you quickly pick a theme. I was personally excited about this because usage of the Mint theme is significantly higher than our others, which I believe is simply because it's the default. Now that customers see all of them during onboarding, I hope some pick an alternative.

Finally, once your theme is selected, you cd into the directory containing your starter content, run mint dev, and are off to the races! Mintlify will let you operate your docs as code the same way you do for the rest of your infrastructure.

What's coming next

Claude actually sets export CLAUDECODE=1 when it runs, so you can write your CLIs to detect this and modify command output to include much more detailed, context-rich instructions about how to use it. We are going to be updating all of our commands to leverage this.

const isAgent = process.env.CLAUDECODE === '1';
console.log(
  isAgent
    ? 'Agent mode: npx mint new --theme=<theme> --dir=<docs-dir> && cd <docs-dir> && mint dev'
    : 'Interactive setup starting…'
);

You should never have to sign in to the dashboard to use Mintlify again. We are going to be adding support for mint login, mint publish, mint config, and more in the coming weeks so that you and your terminal agents can do everything from the terminal. Having to open a web app is a friction point we are excited to remove.

Try it out today!

Terminal agents thrive on simple and composable tools. mint new is our first step toward a CLI that feels native in those loops, fast, predictable, and agent aware by default. Preview a site in seconds with npx mint new, preview with mint dev, and keep building without leaving your terminal.

We want to build this with you. Spin up a site with npx mint new, then share feedback and ideas. Tag @mintlify on X to tell us what would make your agent workflow smoother. Your notes shape what ships next including mint login and mint publish. We read everything, happy documenting!