Announcing Cline CLI 2.0 with free Kimi K2.5: A major upgrade on both interactive and autonomous agentic coding in terminal

Software engineering is entering a new phase, one where coding agents are no longer assistants, but collaborators. 

For decades, the terminal has been the interface developers instinctively trust. It’s fast, scriptable, composable, and brutally honest. At the same time, models are getting dramatically more capable. As agents move from editing single files to reasoning across entire repositories, workflows shift: developers spend less time scrutinizing line-by-line diffs inside IDEs and more time orchestrating intent, validating outcomes, and running systems end-to-end. 

This is where the coding-agent CLI comes into focus. The terminal is uniquely suited for managing long-running agents, parallel sessions, automation, and headless execution. It turns AI from a point-and-click feature into an infrastructure primitive.

While Cline CLI has been a powerful tool that developers already love, we doubled down our investment in this area and made significant improvements on the user's CLI experience. We re-built the CLI ground up ourselves, leveraging the same core of Cline within IDE, so you are experiencing exactly the same agentic loop.

Try it along with a limited-time free trial powered by Kimi K2.5. Start building with it now.

What’s new in Cline CLI 2.0

Better interactive experience

For exactly the same agent loop you loved in IDE, now it’s seamless in our CLI. Plan your tasks, watch agents reason and execute step by step, switch between models, and iterate in real time, all without leaving the terminal.

We were deliberate in designing the terminal UI to closely mirror the core interaction patterns developers are used to in IDEs, from the agent loop and step-by-step execution to real-time feedback and control. By aligning the TUI semantics with familiar IDE workflows, we minimize context switching and make the transition from editor to terminal feel natural, predictable, and low-friction.

Spin up multiple instances at your fingertip

With the new Cline CLI, you can spin up multiple agent instances in parallel, each working on a different task, branch, or idea directly from the terminal. Whether you’re exploring alternatives, running long-lived tasks, or coordinating work across sessions with tools like tmux, the CLI makes it easy to manage and switch between agents without breaking focus.

Use it in your automated pipeline

Cline in non-interactive mode is perfect for using it in automated pipelines in a fully scriptable fashion.

The CLI fully supports stdin and stdout. You can pipe content directly into Cline, append a prompt on top of that input, and chain it seamlessly with the rest of your shell workflow.

When running in -y / -yolo mode, Cline skips the interactive UI entirely and streams everything to stdout. This makes it ideal for CI/CD pipelines, shell scripts, and composing Cline with other command-line tools—treating the agent as just another building block in your automation stack.

git show | cline -y "summarize in only one line"

Connect to various IDEs via ACP

The `client -acp` flag turns cline into an ACP (Agent Client Protocol) compliant agent, a standardized protocol that enables AI coding agents to integrate seamlessly with editors and IDEs. With ACP, you can run Cline alongside IDEs even without a native Cline extension, giving you flexibility to pair the CLI with the tools and workflows you already use.

See Cline in action connecting with Zed & Neovim via ACP:

Open source, open choice

Cline CLI is part of the broader Cline open-source project, trusted by over 5 million developers and built to actively contribute back to the open-source ecosystem.

With Cline CLI, you’re not locked into a single model or vendor. The CLI is designed to support a wide range of model choices, giving developers the freedom to bring their own models, experiment across providers, and evolve their workflows without artificial constraints. We will share more benchmarking results on cline with different models in the upcoming blogs.

More to come

This release reflects a huge amount of work from the team, driven by a simple goal: to empower the open-source community with a first-class coding-agent CLI. We’re excited to see what you build with Cline CLI 2.0, and you can start experimenting today for free with Kimi K2.5, one of the best open-source models available.

We’re moving fast and iterating in the open, so your feedback truly matters. Please keep the ideas, issues, and discussions coming: whether through GitHub issues, Reddit, or Discord. 

This is just the beginning and happy building!