CircleCI day-to-day developer workflow (CLI)

The everyday loop: change config → commit/push → watch the run → read failures → rerun. Almost every command infers the project from the current git remote and the branch from your checked-out branch, so from inside a repo you rarely pass --project/--branch.

Every data-returning command takes --json, and --jq '<expr>' filters it without a separate jq; human output is markdown. Without a terminal the CLI skips the pager, drops color, and fails fast naming the missing flag instead of prompting (for example --value is required in non-interactive mode.), so there is nothing to set up defensively.

Preflight and signing in

Run circleci version, then circleci auth me. It reads $CIRCLE_TOKEN (which wins over a stored token) and confirms which user it resolves to, so it doubles as the auth check. It fails with No CircleCI API token found when there is no usable token.