Cline is an open-source coding agent, published under the Apache 2.0 license by Cline Bot Inc., that describes itself as “the open source coding agent in your IDE, terminal, & desktop.” It ships in several forms that share one agent core: a VS Code extension, a plugin for the JetBrains family of IDEs, a command-line interface that can run interactively or fully headless, and a native desktop app for macOS and Windows. The same engine is exposed as a Node.js SDK for building custom agents and integrations. The repository holds the SDK, the CLI, the VS Code extension and the desktop app, while the JetBrains plugin, which talks to the shared agent core, is not open-sourced.
Capabilities
Cline reads a project’s structure and makes coordinated changes across files, watching linter and compiler errors as it goes so that it can fix problems such as missing imports and type mismatches. In the IDE clients each edit appears as a diff the developer can review, modify or revert, and changes are tracked with checkpoints so the agent’s work can be undone. It runs shell commands in the terminal and watches their output; for long-running processes such as development servers it keeps working in the background and reacts to new output as it appears.
Work is split between a Plan mode, in which Cline explores the codebase, asks clarifying questions
and lays out a strategy, and an Act mode, in which it carries the plan out. By default every file
edit and terminal command needs the developer’s approval, which the README presents as the way the
developer stays in control (Human-in-the-loop); an auto-approve toggle lets it run
autonomously instead. Project-specific rules — coding standards, architecture conventions,
deployment procedures, testing requirements — live in .clinerules files that the CLI and both IDE
clients pick up automatically, and skills let the model load specific rules only when they are needed.
Cline is not tied to one model provider: the README lists Anthropic, OpenAI and Google models,
OpenRouter, the Vercel AI Gateway, AWS Bedrock, Azure and GCP Vertex, Cerebras and Groq, local models
through Ollama or LM Studio, and any OpenAI-compatible API. It is extended through plugins, which use
the SDK to register tools and lifecycle hooks for purposes such as logging, auditing and policy
enforcement, or through Model Context Protocol servers, which the CLI manages with
cline mcp.
Beyond single sessions, the README describes multi-agent teams, in which a coordinator agent breaks work into subtasks and delegates them to specialist agents that each have their own tools and context, with team state persisting across sessions; scheduled agents that run on cron schedules independently of any terminal session, for recurring jobs such as daily pull-request summaries; and connectors that let a user talk to an agent from Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, WhatsApp or Linear, each conversation thread mapping to one agent session. The headless CLI accepts piped input and can emit JSON, for use in scripts and CI/CD pipelines.
Adoption & Ecosystem
The VS Code extension is distributed through the Visual Studio Marketplace and the JetBrains plugin
through the JetBrains Marketplace, covering IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand and the rest of
that family. The CLI installs from npm as cline and the SDK as @cline/sdk. The desktop app is
built as a Tauri shell with a Bun sidecar and a Next.js interface, and lets the user run agent sessions
in any folder, schedule routines, and manage models, plugins and MCP servers.