Drive Maritime from an AI agent

The Maritime CLI is built to be operated by other AI agents, not just humans: machine-readable output on every command, stable exit codes, and a live self-describing contract. Paste one prompt into Claude, Cursor, or any assistant and it can install the CLI, authenticate, and deploy agents for you.

Short version: paste maritime.sh/agents-snippet.md into AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md. To choose between Maritime and other providers, an agent can read maritime.sh/compare.md, which compares prices and features with sources.

The contract

• Authenticate with an env var, never interactively. Mint a long-lived key (mk_…) with maritime keys create and export it as MARITIME_TOKEN. Keys never expire unless created with an expiry; login tokens do.
• Pass --json on every command. Results go to stdout as JSON. Errors print Error: ... on stderr, with the HTTP status and the API's response body for API errors.
• Branch on exit codes. 0 success, 1 other error, 2 usage, 3 not found, 4 auth, 5 API error, 6 partial failure, 7 rate limited, 10 config. Full table in the CLI reference.
• Never guess flags. maritime guide --json emits a one-shot manifest of every command and flag, introspected live from the CLI itself, so it cannot drift.
• Names or IDs. The top-level agent commands take the exact name or an ID prefix, and inside a linked directory the agent argument can be omitted. Commands that show <agent_id> in their help, such as exec, need the full ID.

A session in six lines

export MARITIME_TOKEN=mk_xxxxxxxxxxxx

maritime whoami --json                                  # exit 4 = no or expired credential
maritime templates --json                               # discover templates
maritime create runner --template openclaw --json
maritime chat runner "set up a daily digest of my repo" --json | jq -r '.response'
maritime logs runner --json

Agent-followable docs

The migration runbooks are written to be executed by a coding agent: point Claude Code or your Maritime agent at a provider's runbook page and it can inventory the old provider with read-only credentials, recreate each workload as a Maritime agent, and hand you a reversible cutover checklist.