I created a cider task in my profile.boot (basically, copied the wiki "better method") and set my cider-boot-parameters to cider repl -s wait.

what's weird is, when I first installed cider it pulled 0.11.0-SNAPSHOT, and it complained about being out of sync with 0.10.2. I uninstalled cider, pinned it to melpa-stable and re-installed. FWIW, I don't get the complaint when running with lein.

Hm, it's probably some small detail in your boot config, but my boot knowledge is nil

If no one else replies here, just open a new issue with full details of your configs and the messages you get. Someone will surely see it there.

@curtosis you can do the whole thing from the command line actually, see https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider/issues/1531 for details

so this: [boot] -d cider/cider-nrepl:0.10.2 -d org.clojure/tools.nrepl:0.2.12 repl -m cider.nrepl/cider-middleware -s wait might just do the trick without the task

and plan is that cider would do this for you

that actually pointed me to the problem -- somehow I'd missed adding cider-middleware, which would make sense of the weird symptom (could tell when the versions were out of sync, but couldn't tell when they were in sync). Added in middleware, and everything starts up all nice and quietly. Thanks!