// the find
cline/cline
Autonomous coding agent as an SDK, IDE extension, or CLI assistant.
Cline is an open-source autonomous coding agent that ships as a VS Code/JetBrains extension, a CLI, a native desktop app, and an SDK, all built on the same underlying agent engine. It's aimed at developers who want an AI pair-programmer that can edit code, run shell commands, and operate either interactively with approval gates or fully headless in CI.
Genuinely provider-agnostic — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Bedrock, Azure/GCP Vertex, Ollama/LM Studio, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so you're not locked into one vendor's pricing or rate limits. One core engine powers six different surfaces (CLI, desktop, VS Code, JetBrains, SDK, headless mode), which is a real architectural commitment rather than a thin wrapper per platform. The plan/act split plus per-edit diffs and checkpoints gives you a sane default (review everything) with an explicit opt-in to autonomy (auto-approve), rather than forcing one mode. MCP support and a programmatic plugin API (tools + lifecycle hooks) mean it's extensible for policy enforcement or domain tools without forking the agent.
The JetBrains plugin is explicitly closed-source ('currently we are not open-sourcing JetBrains plugins'), which undercuts the open-source framing for anyone on that IDE. The monorepo is mid-restructure — the README itself flags the VS Code extension's location as 'WIP migrating' — so expect churn in import paths and docs for a while. Scheduled agents, multi-agent teams, and chat-platform connectors (Slack, Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp) add a lot of unattended-execution surface, but there's nothing in the README about cost caps or loop/runaway-tool-call guardrails for those modes. At ~70k stars the project is popular enough that you're dependent on a single company's (Cline Bot Inc.) roadmap and API stability, and issue/PR triage at that volume is going to be noisy.