mstar-use-cli

CLI contract (mstar-use-cli)

The CLI is the harness's machine surface: gates, coordination writes and validators sit behind it. This skill is the index that says which family answers a task, what must be true before running it, in what order a sequence goes, and how to read the answer.

It is deliberately silent in one direction. Command help is generated from the same source that parses the arguments, so it is the only non-drifting owner of flags, option wording and argument shapes. Help cannot express cross-command choice, preconditions, sequence order or refusal meaning — those are what this skill owns.

Load Order

1. mstar-harness-core — lifecycle, gates, authorization and conflict authority; first read whenever it is loaded.
2. The owning topical skill for the family about to run (named in the task index below) — it holds the semantics, role boundaries and surrounding workflow.
3. This skill — the CLI transport contract for that family.

Conditional scope: this applies when a CLI binary is on PATH. Where the CLI is absent, the engine-import / prose path declared by each topical skill stays authoritative; do not read the command text here as a load-order dependency, and never use this skill as a substitute for the owning skill's rules.

Add mstar-host when the host's tool shapes decide how a command is launched.

Scope

Load when:

• a CLI command must be run, or output from one must be interpreted;
• a topical skill's engine-check callout pointed here;
• an exit 1 / 2 came back and its meaning is unclear, or a command refused for a reason that looks like a missing precondition;
• a decision is needed between families (read a row, close a lifecycle, register a document, land a report, check a worktree);
• a coordinated action must be written under its current actor/state and numeric revision or execution-token contract.

Do not load for:

• installation, host bootstrap, per-host config — INSTALL.md plus mstar-host;
• flags, option wording, per-command argument shapes — the CLI help owns them;
• field schemas (mstar-artifacts), iteration phase semantics (mstar-iteration), checkout rules (mstar-branch-worktree), role preset decisions (mstar-roles);
• slash commands (/codebase-audit, /iteration-drive, …). They ship with the host plugin, not the CLI binary; their owning skills (mstar-audit, mstar-iteration, …) hold their contracts.