@jumar and @jr0cket thanks for your help. I finally was able to get to the roots of the issue and solve it. I was able to get auto-complete when i did cider-jack-in but i wasnt able to get it when i did cider connect thats when i figured that there will be some issue with my cider config. hence i revisited spacemacs clojure layer https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/tree/master/layers/%2Blang/clojure and figured out i hadn't created global profiles.clj as stated there which enables clj-refactor and clj-repl functionalities globally. Once i created the profiles.clj in ~/.lein i was able to get it in cider-connect also. Yay Thanx for your help