Cline Delegate

When to Use

• You want to delegate a bounded coding task to a separate cline implementer (Cline) and then review its diff yourself.
• The user explicitly asked for delegation to this implementer.

You are the orchestrator. Delegate a bounded coding task to a separate implementer - the Cline coding agent CLI - then review what it produced and land it yourself. You write the brief and own the judgment; the implementer makes changes in its own session in a clean working tree; you verify and commit.

The loop needs only a shell command and file access, so any comparable orchestrator can drive it.

When NOT to use this

• The task is small enough to do inline; delegation overhead is not worth it.
• The cline CLI is not installed or authenticated.
• You require the relay to configure a sandbox. Cline exposes sandbox controls, but this relay leaves them to the CLI environment; use --plan when the run must be read-only.

Prerequisites (check once)

1. Install cline (npm or bundled binary; the relay probes cline --version).
2. Authenticate: run cline auth (interactive sign-in), or configure ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / an OpenAI-compatible base URL.
3. Confirm cline --version succeeds.
4. Work in, or point --cd at, the target git repository.

Choose the model (optional)

Cline picks a default model. To choose another, pass the separate --model <id> or --provider <name> (e.g. anthropic, openai-native, openrouter). The relay accepts letters, digits, and . _ : / - only (the value reaches a shell on Windows).

The loop

Run these five steps per task. Steps 1, 4, and 5 require judgment; 2 and 3 are mechanical.

1. Write a brief

Cline sees only the text you send. It cannot read your conversation: the brief must stand alone with the goal, current state, what to change, what to leave untouched, the project's real gates, and a report contract. Keep each brief to a single task. Write it to a file and pass it as the relay's --brief. See references/writing-the-brief.md.

2. Dispatch

Use the bundled relay. It runs cline --json -v, streams the brief on stdin behind a fixed positional instruction, captures the JSON event stream, and writes result.json.

node "<skill-dir>/scripts/relay.mjs" --brief brief.txt --cd /path/to/repo
# choose a model / provider:        add --model <id>  --provider <name>
# read-only planning pass:          add --plan   (forces --auto-approve false)
# deny approval-required tools:     add --auto-approve false
# hard time limit (watchdog):        add --timeout 2h   (the 30m default suits brief runs; most implementation briefs should be 1-2h)
# see all options:                   node .../relay.mjs --help

The child's cwd pins the workspace. The relay writes artifacts under the system temp dir by default and never commits. See references/dispatch-and-poll.md.

3. Wait for completion

The relay blocks until cline finishes. Run it with the orchestrator's background-command facility, or background it in the shell and poll for result.json. A pre-run usage error exits 2 and writes no result; a missing cline exits 127 and writes status: "cline_unavailable".

Completion means the process exited and result.json exists - trust process state and the working tree, not the progress display. Cline's final message is the finalMessage field of result.json.

4. Review - do not trust the self-report

• Re-run the project's gates yourself.
• Read the diff against the brief, starting with touchedFiles.
• Run relevant guard skills if installed.

See references/review-and-land.md.

5. Land it

If the work is good, commit it. The relay never commits - the diff and result.json are the record; run git status and git diff first to confirm exactly what changed. If the group has a PR flow, make the commit and push a branch; let human review happen. If the diff is wrong or incomplete, re-dispatch a corrected brief in a fresh run and review again.

Autonomy and permissions

The relay explicitly passes Cline's --auto-approve, defaulting to true in act mode. Cline plan mode can request a switch to act mode, so --plan forces --auto-approve false; the relay rejects --plan --auto-approve true. That pair is the read-only gate. Cline also exposes sandbox

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