Blog

Updates and insights from the Cline team on AI, coding, and developer tools.

The Local LLM Reality Check: What Actually Happens When You Try to Run AI Models on Your Computer

Nick Baumann•January 28, 2025•3 min read

If you've used DeepSeek's R1 (or V3 for that matter), you've probably been impressed at its performance for the price. And if you've run into issues with its API recently, your next thought was probably, “Hey, I’ve got a decent computer—maybe I can run this locally and run this myself!” Then reality hits: the full DeepSeek R1 model needs about 1,342 GB of VRAM—no, that’s not a typo. It’s designed to run on a cluster of 16 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, each with 80GB of memory (source). Let’s break down wha

DeepSeek's Wild Week: A View from the Developer Trenches

Nick Baumann•January 28, 2025•3 min read

Last week, Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, caused the biggest single-day drop in NVIDIA's history, wiping nearly $600 billion from the chip giant's market value. But while Wall Street panicked about DeepSeek's cost claims, Cline users in our community were discovering a more nuanced reality. The Promise vs The Reality "R1 is so hesitant to open and read files while Claude just bulldozes through them," observed one of our users. This perfectly captures the gap between DeepSeek's impressive bench

Best AI Coding Assistant 2025: Complete Guide to Cline and Cursor

Nick Baumann•January 25, 2025•5 min read

Remember when GitHub Copilot first launched and we thought AI-assisted coding couldn't get more revolutionary? Two years later, we're seeing a fascinating divergence in how AI coding assistants approach development. With recent releases from both Cline (3.2) and Cursor (0.45), we're witnessing not just a battle of features, but a philosophical split in how AI should partner with developers. I've watched both tools mature. Let's cut through the hype and examine what these tools really offer in 2

The Developer's Guide to MCP: From Basics to Advanced Workflows

Nick Baumann•January 23, 2025•4 min read

Picture this: You're deep into development with your AI assistant, trying to juggle multiple tools – GitHub issues need updating, tests need running, and documentation needs reviewing. But instead of the seamless workflow you imagined, you're stuck with manual context switching and disconnected tools. Your AI assistant, brilliant as it is, feels trapped in its chat window. This is where the Model Context Protocol (MCP) changes everything. It's not just another developer tool – it's a fundamenta

Everyone's Talking About R1 vs o1 Benchmarks. But Here's What Really Matters.

Nick Baumann•January 23, 2025•2 min read

In an interesting coincidence, DeepSeek released R1 on the same day we launched Plan & Act modes in Cline. And something fascinating started happening immediately: developers began naturally using R1 for planning phases and 3.5-Sonnet for implementation. Not because anyone suggested it – it just made sense. 0:00 /0:54 1× What's Actually Happening Here's what developers discovered works best: 1. Start new tasks in Plan mode using R1 ($0.55/M tokens)

Why AI Engineers Need Planning More Than Perfect Prompts

Nick Baumann•January 21, 2025•4 min read

The best AI engineers I know follow a specific pattern. They don't obsess over prompt crafting – they obsess over planning. There's a reason for this, and it's not what most people think. The Reality Check Here's what typically happens when someone starts working with AI: 1. They throw requirements at the model 2. They get mediocre outputs 3. They blame their prompting skills 4. They spend hours "optimizing" prompts 5. They still get mediocre results Sound familiar? But here's what eli

Building Advanced Software with Cline: A Structured Approach

Daniel Steigman (Nighttrek)•January 15, 2025•6 min read

As a passionate user of Cline, I've discovered something transformative about modern software development. It's not just another tool in our engineering toolkit—it's a fundamental shift in how we approach complex problems. Through my journey of pushing the boundaries of what can be automated, I've learned that the real power lies not in complete automation, but in the synergy between human insight and AI capabilities. The more time I spend using these tools the more strongly I come to believe th

DeepSeek-V3 isn't "free" Claude 3.5-Sonnet. But it's still insanely good for the price.

Nick Baumann•January 5, 2025•3 min read

DeepSeek released V3 on December 26, and for the first time since 3.5-Sonnet's release, we have a serious contender for best coding LLM—one that's 53x cheaper and was trained for just $5.5M. Since then, Cline has seen installations skyrocket – nearly 50,000 new installs at double our usual daily rate. DeepSeek v3 is mind-blowing. I’m fascinated by the engineering elegance and scrappiness behind it. - MoE + MLA architecture (671B → 37B active) - DualPipe + FP8 , incredibly impressive optimizati