Cline is an open-source AI coding assistant for VS Code that features dual Plan/Act modes, terminal execution capabilities, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for custom tool creation. It serves as a fully collaborative AI partner for developers.

How is Cline different from GitHub Copilot?

Cline is open-source and offers unique features like Plan/Act modes for structured development, terminal command execution, browser automation for testing, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for creating custom development tools.

What programming languages does Cline support?

Cline supports all major programming languages and frameworks through its AI models and can execute terminal commands, edit files, and automate browser testing across different technology stacks.

Insights - Cline Blog

Why Cline Doesn't Index Your Codebase (And Why That's a Good Thing)

Nick Baumann•May 27, 2025•4 min read

Here's a common question we get from prospective Cline users: "How does Cline handle large codebases? Do you use RAG to index everything?" It's a reasonable question. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the go-to solution for giving AI systems access to large knowledge bases. But for Cline, we've taken a deliberately different path. We don't index your codebase, and this choice isn't an oversight, it's a fundamental design decision that delivers better code quality, stronger securit

The Fighter Pilot's Guide to Software Strategy

Andrin Foster•April 18, 2025•5 min read

AI companies are operating in arguably the most hotly contested market in human history. Earth shattering venture rounds incenting and empowering the brightest minds in the world in a winner take most (if not all!) race to the singularity. Amidst this battlefield, I find my thoughts returning to a little known fighter pilot from Pennsylvania who's contributions to strategy have come to rival those of Napoleon and Sun Tzu. Colonel John Boyd. If you've never heard of him, you're not alone. Today

Cline's Context Window Explained: Maximize Performance, Minimize Cost

Nick Baumann•April 17, 2025•3 min read

Ever wondered why a simple "Hi" to Cline might seem to use more resources than expected? Or perhaps you've noticed performance subtly changing during a long coding session? The answer often lies in a crucial, yet sometimes misunderstood, concept: the context window. Understanding it is key to unlocking Cline's full potential while managing performance and cost effectively. Think of the context window as the AI's short-term memory. It's the space where all the information relevant to your curren

SICP Revisited: Writing Code for People and AI Agents

Andrin Foster•April 15, 2025•2 min read

Since SICP, it's been a maxim of software engineering that "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." However, in the age of generative AI, code is increasingly often read by agents as well. As generative AI tools become popular, it's important that we as engineering leaders better understand how agents interpret the code we maintain. Understanding AI's Current Limitations Agents currently do not maintain a long-term understanding of our code

Inside Cline's Framework for Optimizing Context, Maintaining Narrative Integrity, and Enabling Smarter AI

Toshi•April 11, 2025•3 min read

Effective context management is the backbone of productive collaboration with AI coding assistants. As conversations with Cline evolve and become ever more complex, determining how to handle the persistent issue of limited room in the context window becomes increasingly more important – as well as ensuring narrative integrity is maintained during extended conversations. Why focus on token efficiency? Because we're learning that smarter context management is fundamental to performance. Trimming

Human Intent in the Age of AI: Insights from Our Chat with Siddharth Ahuja, Creator of the Ableton & Blender MCPs

Nick Baumann•April 3, 2025•5 min read

The developer community has been buzzing about the possibilities unlocked by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and few examples have captured the imagination quite like Siddharth Ahuja's MCP servers for Ableton Live and Blender. These notoriously complex creative powerhouses, suddenly accessible through natural language prompts via tools like Cline, feel like a glimpse into a new era of software interaction. 🧩 Built an MCP that lets Claude talk directly to Blender. It helps you create beautifu

How Cline Creates Compound Productivity for Engineering Teams

Nik Pash•March 21, 2025•4 min read

Picture this: Your senior engineers spending most of their time on high-level architecture instead of debugging nested loops. Your new hires becoming productive in days instead of months. Your entire team shipping more code with fewer bugs while actually leaving work feeling energized instead of burnt out. Sound like fantasy? It's not. It's what happens when you put a senior engineer in everyone's back pocket. I've been watching engineering teams using Cline (our autonomous coding agent for VS

What Happens When You 5x The Output of Every Engineer: Unlocking Trillions in Economic Value

Nick Baumann•March 20, 2025•7 min read

Last week, we spoke with a San Francisco-based startup that estimated Cline had boosted their engineering output fivefold. While startups tend to adopt new technologies more quickly, we're still in the early days of AI-powered coding. This "5x" increase offers a glimpse into what could be a shockingly transformative future. Welcome to part one of our 5x Engineer Series where we're exploring the world where AI quintuples engineering productivity. What happens when every software engineer on the

The End of Complex UIs: How MCP Servers Are Eliminating Software Learning Curves

Nick Baumann•March 17, 2025•6 min read

Have you seen those viral videos of people creating stunning 3D scenes in Blender by just describing what they want? No clicking through complex menus, no hunting for the right tool in a sea of options, no watching 10-hour YouTube tutorials. Just conversation. 0:00 /0:20 1× This isn't just a neat demo—it's the beginning of the end for complicated user interfaces. The Blender MCP server that's going viral right now is just the first hint of a much large

“5X Force Multiplier”: How a Sports Analytics Startup Scales Their Engineering with Cline

Nick Baumann•March 15, 2025•6 min read

In the fast-paced world of sports analytics, where deadlines are dictated by game schedules and championships, engineering teams face unique challenges. For Cleat Street, a fast-growing sports analytics company launched in 2019 out of a startup lab at Columbia University, the pressure to deliver quality code with a small team meant finding creative solutions to accelerate their development process. Now based in San Francisco with additional offices in Denver, Cleat Street has rapidly expanded t

Full-Power AI Development: Why Cline Doesn't Limit Your Model's Potential

Nick Baumann•March 13, 2025•5 min read

When a senior developer tells you they spent $125 on API credits in a single day but produced 35,000 lines of functional code, is that expensive or a bargain? This question gets to the heart of how we should think about AI coding agents. While the sticker shock of token-based pricing might initially make you wince, the calculus changes dramatically when you consider the actual value delivered. Beyond Subscription Limitations Thus far, we've seen two pricing models for AI coding agents: subsc

Forget "Model Context Protocol" - Just Think of These as Extra Tools for Cline

Nick Baumann•February 22, 2025•3 min read

Yesterday, I asked a developer if he was using MCP in Cline. "I still don't understand what Model Context Protocol is," he said. I had to smile. Here was a developer missing out on powerful tools because he was getting caught up in confusing technical jargon. It's like developers are leaving features on the table because the name sounds too complicated. "Forget Model Context Protocol - that's just distracting you from what matters," I told him. "Think of these as extra tools you can give to C

MCP Servers Explained: What They Are, How They Work, and Why Cline is Revolutionizing AI Tools

Nick Baumann•February 13, 2025•5 min read

Discover what MCP servers are and how they work. Learn how Cline leverages Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to revolutionize AI tool integration and development. Read on for in-depth insights! I was at CodeGen Night in San Francisco on Tuesday and had a chance to talk with some Cline power users about MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. These were sophisticated developers who'd heard of MCP but weren't using it because they weren't fully sure how it worked or why it mattered. This conver

What AI Companies Actually Need Right Now

Nik Pash•February 7, 2025•3 min read

At Cline, we've scaled to 500k+ users and raised significant funding from top-tier VCs. As Head of AI, I recently interviewed a strong ML engineer candidate. Despite their solid background, I voted "no hire." Let me explain why - it reveals a broader pattern about what AI companies actually need right now, and getting this wrong can be a $200k+ mistake. The $200k Mistake: Why Hiring MLEs Too Early Kills AI Startups Here's a pattern I see repeatedly in well-funded AI startups: 1. Raise a sub

From Assembly to AI: Why 'Vibe Coding' Is Just Another Chapter in Our Abstraction Story

Nick Baumann•February 6, 2025•4 min read

Two days ago, Andrej Karpathy set Tech Twitter ablaze with a provocative idea he calls "vibe coding" – where you "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." Using AI tools (like Cline), he demonstrated building an entire LLM reader application in about an hour, barely touching the keyboard. The reactions were predictable and eerily familiar to anyone who knows their computing history. But to understand why, we need to go back. Way back. What is 'ab

The End of Context Amnesia: Cline's Visual Solution to Context Management

Nick Baumann•January 30, 2025•5 min read

Ever stared at Cline wondering if it's about to hit a wall? You're deep in a complex refactoring task, and suddenly he seems to "forget" what you were discussing just moments ago. If this sounds familiar, you're running into one of the most common yet least understood aspects of AI coding assistants: context windows. Today, we're introducing a new feature in Cline that makes this invisible limit visible: the Context Window Progress Bar. What's a Context Window, Anyway? Think of a context win

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•6 min read

Updated March 4, 2025 article to reflect recent developments 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 (now 3.5) and Cursor (0.46), 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 c

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)

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