Companion to bench-vs-bare-cli-spec.md and results-2026-04-29.md. The bench measures parent-context bytes / wall-clock for workflows that both paths support. This document lists workflows where bare-shell has no meaningful equivalent — quantitative comparison is not honest, but the gap is real and worth declaring.
| Workflow | Bare-shell (Bash(<provider> -p ...)) |
polycli |
|---|---|---|
ask (one-shot prompt) |
✓ | ✓ |
review (structured findings on git diff) |
✓* | ✓ |
rescue (long-context investigation) |
✓* | ✓ |
adversarial-review (attack-surface review) |
— | ✓ |
Background job (--background + status / result / cancel) |
— | ✓ |
Session resume (--resume-last / --fresh) |
— | ✓ |
stop-review-gate hook (intercept errant review flows before they continue) |
— | ✓ |
4-state timing (measured / zero / missing / unsupported) |
— | ✓ |
| Multi-host consistency (same command surface across Claude Code / Codex / Copilot CLI / OpenCode) | — | ✓ |
Provider health probe (one round-trip across all providers, returns healthyProviders) |
— | ✓ |
| Probing-cost amortization (cold parent does not pay invocation discovery) | — | ✓ |
*) Bare-shell can technically issue review/rescue prompts via <provider> -p "<hand-crafted prompt>", but the user must reconstruct the prompt template each time. polycli's review/rescue commands embed a vetted, multi-provider-tested template (plugins/polycli/scripts/lib/review.mjs:buildReviewPrompt).
The bench shows polycli reduces parent-context bytes by 69–98% on workflows that bare-shell can do. This document covers workflows that bare-shell cannot meaningfully do without re-implementing polycli's companion script.
These are not refinements of the bench's percentages — they are presence/absence claims. polycli either supports them or it doesn't (it does); bare-shell either supports them or it doesn't (it doesn't).
Forcing a workflow with no bare-shell equivalent into a token-comparison would be dishonest — there is nothing to compare against. The honest framing is: bench measures common-denominator workflows, this matrix lists polycli's superset.
| Capability | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Background job control | plugins/polycli/scripts/lib/job-control.mjs; companion status / result / cancel commands |
| Session resume | polycli-runtime per-provider sessionResume flag — see README capability matrix |
| 4-state timing | packages/polycli-timing/ |
| Adversarial-review | plugins/polycli/commands/adversarial-review.md; lib/review.mjs with adversarial: true |
stop-review-gate |
plugins/polycli/scripts/stop-review-gate-hook.mjs; prompts/stop-review-gate.md |
| Multi-host consistency | marketplace manifests under plugins/{polycli,polycli-codex,polycli-copilot,polycli-opencode} |
Provider health probe |
companion health command; per-provider auth probes in polycli-runtime |
| Probing-cost amortization | plugins/polycli/agents/polycli-provider-agent.md (the agent encapsulates the invocation pattern) |