feat: Auto-fallback to user scope when not in a git repo

[gricha]

Previously, running any dotagents command without --user always assumed project scope, which meant commands failed with "Config file not found" when run outside a project. Users had to know about --user upfront.

Now commands intelligently resolve scope when --user is not passed:

Situation	Behavior
agents.toml exists at cwd	Project scope (unchanged)
Not inside any git repo	Auto-fallback to user scope, prints notice
In a repo, no agents.toml	Error: "Run dotagents init or use --user"
--user passed	Always user scope (unchanged)

This makes dotagents add, dotagents install, etc. work from anywhere (e.g. ~/Downloads, /tmp) without requiring --user — since there's no project context, user scope is the only sensible target. When inside a repo without agents.toml, we error with a helpful message rather than silently falling back, since the user likely intended project scope and forgot to init.

Adds isInsideGitRepo() (walks up looking for .git), resolveDefaultScope(), and ScopeError to scope.ts. Each command's entry point switches from the old one-liner to flags?.user ? resolveScope("user") : resolveDefaultScope(resolve(".")). The init command uses isInsideGitRepo directly since it doesn't require an existing config.

Agent transcript: https://claudescope.sentry.dev/share/fkGkDLJxGI6t9eEm3C9vODNUwIdsQxBWkNY6YjydThg

[cursor]

Cursor Bugbot has reviewed your changes and found 2 potential issues.

^{Bugbot Autofix is OFF. To automatically fix reported issues with Cloud Agents, enable Autofix in the Cursor dashboard.}

[cursor]

Init scope resolution skips agents.toml existence check

Medium Severity

The init command's scope resolution logic doesn't check for agents.toml existence before falling back based on git repo detection, unlike resolveDefaultScope used by every other command. In a non-git directory that already has agents.toml (e.g., a Mercurial project, or a copied project), other commands correctly resolve to project scope, but dotagents init --force would silently target user scope instead, potentially overwriting ~/.agents/agents.toml while leaving the project config untouched.

Additional Locations (1)

• src/scope.ts#L79-L93

 

[cursor]

Dead root variable in isInsideGitRepo loop termination

Low Severity

The root variable and the parent === root check in isInsideGitRepo are dead code. When root is defined (i.e., dir is the filesystem root itself), parent === current is already true on the very first iteration, so parent === root is never the deciding condition. When root is undefined (the normal case), parent === root is always false. The loop terminates correctly via parent === current alone in all cases, making the root variable misleading — it suggests a special case is being handled when it isn't.