Delegate bounded coding tasks to Cline agent and review diffs

Lets an orchestrating agent hand a bounded coding task to the Cline coding-agent CLI as a separate implementer, then review what it produced and land it itself. Dispatch runs through the bundled relay, which wraps Cline's headless JSON mode (cline --json -v), captures its NDJSON event stream, and writes a structured result.json. Because current Cline JSON mode checks for a positional prompt before it will read piped input, the relay streams the real brief on stdin behind a fixed positional instruction ("Follow the task instructions provided on stdin.") rather than passing the brief itself as an argument - keeping it out of argv and clear of command-line length and Windows shell-quoting limits. Before dispatch the relay runs a bounded 10-second cline --version preflight so a hung or crashing CLI fails fast instead of hanging the run.

Autonomy is controlled by --auto-approve, which the relay passes through to Cline and which defaults to true in act mode; --plan switches to Cline's plan mode and forces --auto-approve false (the relay outright rejects --plan --auto-approve true), because Cline's plan mode can otherwise request a switch to act mode and auto-approve it. Cline also exposes its own sandbox controls through --data-dir / CLINE_SANDBOX, but the relay deliberately leaves those to the inherited CLI environment rather than configuring them itself - --plan is the read-only gate this relay actually provides. A significant limitation versus other delegate relays: Cline's verified headless JSON path does not support session resume, so every correction or rework is a fresh run whose brief must restate the needed context from scratch, since a fresh session remembers nothing from an earlier one.

Use it to delegate a bounded coding task to a separate cline implementer and then review its diff yourself, when the user explicitly asked for delegation to this implementer. Do NOT use it when: the task is small enough to do inline and delegation overhead isn't worth it; the cline CLI is not installed or authenticated; or the task requires the relay itself to configure a sandbox - Cline exposes sandbox controls, but this relay leaves them to the CLI environment, so use --plan when the run must be read-only instead of expecting relay-level sandboxing.

The brief is a self-contained, block-structured document (<task>, <verification_loop> naming real gate commands, <action_safety> forbidding commits, <structured_output_contract>), since Cline sees only the text sent to it and cannot read the orchestrator's conversation. Dispatch:

node "<skill-dir>/scripts/relay.mjs" --brief brief.txt --cd /path/to/repo

Outputs land in a run directory (temp by default): brief.txt, events.jsonl (every raw event Cline emitted - useful for reconstructing lost work if a run is killed late), final.txt, stderr.txt, and result.json. Key result.json fields are status (completed/failed/timeout/aborted/cline_unavailable), finalMessage (from Cline's run_result.text), touchedFiles (git status --porcelain for the final tree - not an attribution, since anything already dirty before dispatch shows up too), actualProvider/actualModel, planMode, autoApprove, and finishReason. Cline never commits; the orchestrator does, after re-running the project's real gates and reading the diff.

Wraps the cline CLI, installed as a native binary on macOS/Linux or an npm package on Windows, authenticated via cline auth (interactive) or by configuring ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / an OpenAI-compatible base URL. Supports --provider <name> (e.g. anthropic, openai-native, openrouter) and --model <id> to pick a specific model instead of Cline's own default, and can apply a fleet lane's dials from a companion delegate-setup configuration via --lane. Cline auto-discovers a workspace's AGENTS.md, though the skill still recommends restating load-bearing constraints directly in the brief.

Orchestrating agents that need to delegate a scoped coding task to the Cline CLI while keeping review-and-commit authority, especially for one-shot dispatches where session resume is not needed since Cline's headless path does not support it. Adapted from the community amElnagdy/delegate-skills repository under the MIT license; this catalog entry is a docs-only import, since the executable scripts/relay.mjs is not bundled here.