cursor-cli-headless

What This Skill Does

The cursor-cli-headless skill provides an automated interface for the Cursor AI agent, enabling developers to integrate sophisticated coding tasks directly into CI/CD pipelines, shell scripts, and batch processing workflows. By running in a non-interactive, headless mode, this skill acts as a bridge between your automated systems and Cursor's powerful codebase-aware AI models. It supports automated code generation, refactoring, documentation updates, and technical analysis, all executed via a command-line wrapper script.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw management CLI: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/daxingplay/cursor-cli-headless

Ensure that you have the Cursor CLI installed on your local machine or server. You can verify this by running agent --version. If it is not present, install it via curl https://cursor.com/install -fsS | bash. Once installed, ensure you are authenticated by running agent login or by setting the CURSOR_API_KEY environment variable for non-interactive execution in automated environments.

Use Cases

This skill is designed for high-efficiency development workflows. Use it to:

• Automate Code Refactoring: Trigger batch refactors across large repositories.
• CI/CD Integration: Run automated tests or documentation updates as part of a commit hook or pull request process.
• Large-scale codebase analysis: Batch process files to extract summaries, identify technical debt, or generate standardized API documentation.
• Automated Issue Resolution: Connect your ticketing system to a script that feeds issue descriptions directly to the agent to generate and apply proposed code changes.

Example Prompts

1. "Run the refactor script on the src/utils directory to update all deprecated loggers to the new standard format."
2. "Analyze the project documentation in the docs folder and update the CONTRIBUTING.md file to reflect the latest project structure."
3. "Generate unit tests for the newly created auth-middleware.ts file and ensure they cover all edge cases."

Tips & Limitations

• Safety First: The default configuration allows file modifications. For exploration, use --no-force to let the agent propose changes without applying them.
• Streaming: The default stream-json format is ideal for real-time monitoring but requires jq for advanced processing. If integrating into a strict script, use -o json --no-stream to receive a clean JSON payload.
• Context: Always specify the working directory with -d to ensure the agent has the correct context of the project root.
• Limitations: Headless mode relies on the environment's CURSOR_API_KEY. It does not have access to a GUI, so complex tasks requiring visual confirmation or manual interaction should be handled through standard IDE interfaces.