agent-signals

029. The first start of each agent with no login

View as Markdown Open in Claude Open in ChatGPT
Date
2026-10-30
Agents
Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor CLI, opencode
Measured on
CI runner ubuntu-latest (x64) and CI runner macos-latest (arm64)

Measured

2026-10-30, the scenario scenarios/first-run.sh in the scenarios workflow (run 41126049221), with a throwaway HOME, no login and no key. Each agent was installed on the runner by the workflow:

Agent Version Install
Claude Code 2.1.314 npm @anthropic-ai/claude-code
Codex CLI 0.166.0 npm @openai/codex
Cursor CLI 2026.10.22-27dcf5f curl https://cursor.com/install
opencode 1.19.5 npm opencode-ai

Measured on: CI runner ubuntu-latest (x64) and CI runner macos-latest (arm64). The two runners gave the same screens and the same files.

What was measured

  1. Claude Code first shows "Choose the text style that looks best with your terminal", with "Dark mode" selected. Below ~/.claude it made only sessions/<pid>.<hex>.key, backups/, cache/changelog.md, and ~/.claude.json. There is no sessions/<pid>.json, as before the trust answer in fact 23.
  2. Codex CLI first shows "Choose how you want to use Codex." with "1. Sign in with ChatGPT", "2. Sign in with Device Code", "3. Use an OpenAI API key" and "4. Use Amazon Bedrock". Only the TUI runs: no app-server daemon starts before a login. The TUI holds the SQLite files state_5, logs_2, goals_1, memories_1 and queue_1 below ~/.codex open. It made about 5,500 files in ~/.codex/.tmp/plugins. The npm install runs the binary from node_modules/@openai/codex/node_modules/@openai/codex-<os>-<cpu>/vendor/<target>/bin/.
  3. Cursor CLI shows "Press any key to log in...". It made ~/.cursor/agent-cli-state.json, cli-config.json and statsig-cache.json. The process is ~/.local/bin/cursor-agent --use-system-ca ~/.local/share/cursor-agent/versions/<version>/index.js.
  4. opencode 1.19.5 holds ~/.local/share/opencode/opencode.db (with -wal and -shm) and log/opencode.log open. It made a Node project in ~/.config/opencode with about 3,600 files in node_modules. Its screen says "/update to upgrade to OpenCode 2.0". The npm package opencode-ai is the 1.x line; the operator's server runs opencode 2.1.4.

Mechanism

A tool that sees a new process of one of these agents with no session file can show "waits for setup or login" in place of "idle". The screens above are the first screens a person sees after an install.

Incident

None.

Screens

None. The screens are in the log of the run, not in the corpus.

Not measured

Screens in the corpus that name this fact