The tool's defaults were designed for human terminal use, but most callers are now agents. Two ideas to reduce guidance overhead by making the defaults better:
If the tool detects it's being called by an agent (piped output, non-TTY, or an env var), default to --oneline output. Humans at a terminal keep the current full output. This matches how agents actually work — scan a compact list first, then drill into specific items. Every agent transcript shows this pattern. The win: shorter SKILL.md guidance because the tool does the right thing by default.
A human user was shown type output and liked it, but was wowed by --shape and said "this should be the default." Consider making --shape the default for type, or at least more prominent. The shape view (showing inheritance, interfaces, member categories) gives an immediate structural understanding that the flat type list doesn't. This parallels the oneline discussion — the best default is the one that answers the most common first question.
dotnet-inspect find "Dictionary<TKey,TValue>" splits on the comma and treats it as two patterns: Dictionary<TKey and TValue>. The comma is the multi-pattern delimiter (find String,Int32). Users should use glob syntax (Dictionary*) instead. Consider documenting this in help text or escaping commas inside <> angle brackets.
When diff reports "Member 'AddOption' was removed", it could also suggest likely replacements from the new version. We already have the ability to detect semantic distance neighbors — use that to find the closest match in the new API surface (e.g. AddOption → Options property or Add method). An agent doing a migration currently needs a follow-up member --oneline call to discover what replaced the removed API. A "possible replacement" hint in the diff output would save that round-trip. Observed in a real agent transcript migrating System.CommandLine beta → 2.0.3.