Cline Delegate

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