Cline is an open-source autonomous coding agent runtime maintained by Cline Bot Inc. and an active open-source community. Available as a standalone CLI, an IDE extension across VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, and Windsurf, and an embeddable SDK, it allows developers to inspect repositories, execute terminal commands, and perform multi-file code modifications across environments. In day-to-day use, Cline follows a Plan-and-Act methodology. Developers can engage Plan mode to evaluate codebases and establish an implementation strategy, then switch to Act mode to perform multi-file edits, monitor long-running processes, and react to bash command outputs live. Cline is model-agnostic and operates on a bring-your-own-key or local-inference basis, supporting Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex, Azure, DeepSeek, Ollama, LM Studio, and any OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. Cline distinguishes itself through deep extensibility via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and granular execution controls. Teams can configure project-specific behaviors using repository-level .clinerules, inspect visual diffs at each step, and utilize checkpoints with one-click undo capabilities. It also supports headless execution for continuous integration pipelines, scheduled cron tasks, and chat bridge integrations like Slack and Linear. Cline is distributed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, allowing complete local data ownership and freedom from proprietary runtime lock-in.
Tags: cli, code assistant, coding agent, developer tools, OpenSource