The primary interface for agents we provide is the Meticulous CLI plus a range of pre-defined skills. These skills enable AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex/ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.) to use Meticulous: review test runs, investigate replays, debug diffs, etc.
The Meticulous CLI is required to run simulations and test runs from the command line:
npm install --global @alwaysmeticulous/cli@latest
You can also install it locally per-project instead of globally.
If you'd rather not install anything, see the MCP server page instead — it exposes the same read and analysis commands as tools your agent can call directly over a hosted connection.
The CLI and MCP are under active development with frequent changes and improvements — re-run the same command to update the CLI to the latest version (the hosted MCP server always stays up to date automatically). The skills also invoke the meticulous-cli-update skill at the start of every workflow to keep this in sync automatically.
Authenticate the CLI with your Meticulous account:
meticulous auth login
This will open a browser to sign in, and if you're a member of multiple projects, let you pick a default project to use. This default is saved to your Meticulous account — so it's consistent across machines and available to the MCP server — and you can change it any time from your user settings or by running meticulous auth set-project. Non-interactive versions of both commands are also available, for use in CI or other non-TTY environments:
meticulous auth login --non-interactive --project <organization/project>
meticulous auth set-project --project <organization/project>
If the CLI is running on a remote or sandboxed machine (SSH session, container, cloud coding agent) where a browser can't reach that machine's localhost, use --device instead: it logs in via the OAuth device flow, printing a URL and code that can be opened and confirmed in a browser on any device.
meticulous auth login --device --project <organization/project>
Install skills into your project using npx skills:
# Claude Code only: create .claude/ first if it doesn't already exist
mkdir -p .claude
# Install all skills for the specified agents
npx skills add alwaysmeticulous/skills --all --agents claude-code,codex,cursor
# Update already-installed skills to the latest version
npx skills update --project
See the Skills page for the full list of available skills and what each one does.
The Meticulous skills run a small set of CLI commands and read downloaded screenshots from ~/.meticulous/agent-images/. Pre-allowing these in your agent configuration avoids repeated permission prompts during a session.
Add the following to .claude/settings.json (project-level) or ~/.claude/settings.json (user-level). Replace /HOME/DIR with your home directory path (e.g. /Users/alice).
{
"permissions": {
"allow": [
"Read(~/.meticulous/agent-images/**)",
"Bash(meticulous *)",
"Skill(meticulous-cli-update)",
"Bash(npm view @alwaysmeticulous/cli version)",
// If you want to auto-approve updating the CLI and skills, also add:
"Bash(npm install --global @alwaysmeticulous/cli@latest)",
"Bash(npx skills update --project)"
]
}
}
Add the following to ~/.codex/rules/default.rules:
prefix_rule(pattern=["meticulous"], decision="allow")
prefix_rule(pattern=["npm", "view", "@alwaysmeticulous/cli", "version"], decision="allow")
# If you want to auto-approve updating the CLI and skills, also add:
prefix_rule(pattern=["npm", "install", "--global", "@alwaysmeticulous/cli@latest"], decision="allow")
prefix_rule(pattern=["npx", "skills", "update", "--project"], decision="allow")
Add the following entries to Cursor's Command Allowlist:
meticulous
npm view @alwaysmeticulous/cli version
# If you want to auto-approve updating the CLI and skills, also add:
npm install --global @alwaysmeticulous/cli@latest
npx skills update --project