invoke-agent

name	invoke-agent
description	Playbook for invoking non-interactive coding-agent CLIs (codex, gemini, cursor, kimi, claude) as subprocesses. Use this skill inside a moderate-debate per-turn subagent, or when any skill needs to shell out to another AI CLI with a prompt and capture the reply — covers install checks, exact non-interactive invocation, input/output conventions, budget flags, and known per-CLI quirks.
license	MIT
compatibility	Requires the relevant CLI binaries (codex, gemini, cursor-agent, kimi, claude) on PATH for any participating agent.

invoke-agent — CLI invocation playbook

This skill is a reference library, not a flow. When you need to call another AI CLI, read the relevant file below for the exact command, flags, input conventions, output parsing rules, and known quirks.

Where this is read from: moderate-debate does not call CLIs from its own context. Each turn is dispatched into a fresh subagent (Agent / Task tool, isolated context) that loads the playbook for one CLI, runs the call, validates the contract, and returns a small structured result. See ../moderate-debate/SKILL.md § "Per-turn subagent" for the contract between moderator and subagent. If you find yourself reading these playbooks from a long-lived debate context, you are in the wrong place — dispatch a subagent.

Supported CLIs

CLI	File	Typical use
codex	references/codex.md	OpenAI Codex CLI
gemini	references/gemini.md	Google Gemini CLI
cursor	references/cursor.md	Cursor Agent CLI (cursor-agent)
kimi	references/kimi.md	Moonshot Kimi CLI
claude	references/claude.md	Anthropic Claude Code CLI

Common invocation shape

Every CLI playbook follows the same schema so you can read them interchangeably:

1. Install check — one shell command that proves the CLI is on PATH.
2. Invoke — the exact non-interactive command template with placeholders for {prompt}, {model}, {system}.
3. Input — stdin vs. flag vs. file. How to pass long prompts (usually: heredoc to stdin, or a tempfile).
4. Output — stdout shape (plain text, JSON, streaming). Any banner/ANSI stripping rules.
5. Budget flags — token/time caps if the CLI supports them.
6. Known quirks — auth env vars, rate limits, non-zero exits that are benign, output truncation.

General rules for the caller

• Always non-interactive. Use the CLI's one-shot / headless / -p / exec flag. Never spawn an interactive shell.
• Pass the full prompt via stdin or a tempfile. Command-line length limits bite on long debate contexts. Use a heredoc:

  codex exec - <<'PROMPT'
  <prompt body>
  PROMPT
  

• Capture stdout and stderr to the per-turn directory at .senate/runs/<id>/stages/<n>-<name>/turns/<NNN>-<cli>-<role>/{stdout,stderr}.log (the moderator mints this directory before dispatching the per-turn subagent; <NNN> is the monotonic turn number from transcript.jsonl). Always keep stdout.log, even if empty on a hard failure — the workspace contract uses it as the stable raw-output slot, and the moderator records its path on the transcript line. Delete stderr.log only when it ends up empty ([ -s "$TURN_DIR/stderr.log" ] || rm -f "$TURN_DIR/stderr.log").
• Read exit code. Classify failures with ../moderate-debate/references/failures.md; retry only for that file's retryable cases (rate_limit, timeout, and the documented exit-0 empty-stdout unknown case), sharing the same single r1 retry budget as contract re-prompts.
• Strip ANSI. Pipe through sed 's/\x1b\[[0-9;]*m//g' if the CLI emits color codes even when stdout is a pipe.
• Timeout. Wrap every invocation with the portable timeout command defined in ../moderate-debate/references/budget.md (use GNU timeout when available, gtimeout on Homebrew/Coreutils macOS installs, otherwise the Perl fallback). Do not assume bare timeout exists on macOS.
• Sanitize. Never put shell metacharacters from the transcript into a command line — pass everything via stdin.

If a CLI isn't supported yet

Copy one of the existing files as a template, fill in the six sections above, and add it to the table. No code changes needed anywhere else.

Files in this skill

Per-CLI playbooks (load only the file matching the CLI you're about to invoke this turn):

• references/codex.md
• references/gemini.md
• references/cursor.md
• references/kimi.md
• references/claude.md

Cross-cutting reference (load only on demand):

• references/skill-authoring.md — Agent Skills spec & best practices. Load only when the prompt being sent to a CLI is asking it to author or revise an Agent Skill (otherwise it is dead weight in context).