Cline: the open source coding agent that doesn't cut costs

Saoud Rizwan and Pash from Cline joined us to talk about why fast apply models got bitter lesson'd, how they pioneered the plan + act paradigm for coding, and why non-technical people use IDEs to do marketing and generate slides.

Full writeup: https://www.latent.space/p/cline

X: https://x.com/latentspacepod

Chapters:

00:00 - Introductions
01:35 - Plan and Act Paradigm
05:37 - Model Evaluation and Early Development of Cline
08:14 - Use Cases of Cline Beyond Coding
09:09 - Why Cline is a VS Code Extension and Not a Fork
12:07 - Economic Value of Programming Agents
16:07 - Early Adoption for MCPs
19:35 - Local vs Remote MCP Servers
22:10 - Anthropic's Role in MCP Registry
22:49 - Most Popular MCPs and Their Use Cases
25:26 - Challenges and Future of MCP Monetization
27:32 - Security and Trust Issues with MCPs
28:56 - Alternative History Without MCP
29:43 - Market Positioning of Coding Agents and IDE Integration Matrix
32:57 - Visibility and Autonomy in Coding Agents
35:21 - Evolving Definition of Complexity in Programming Tasks
38:16 - Forks of Cline and Open Source Regrets
40:07 - Simplicity vs Complexity in Agent Design
46:33 - How Fast Apply Got Bitter Lesson'd
49:12 - Cline's Business Model and Bring-Your-Own-API-Key Approach
54:18 - Integration with OpenRouter and Enterprise Infrastructure
55:32 - Impact of Declining Model Costs
57:48 - Background Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
1:00:42 - Vision and Multi-Modalities
1:01:07 - State of Context Engineering
1:07:37 - Memory Systems in Coding Agents
1:10:14 - Standardizing Rules Files Across Agent Tools
1:11:16 - Cline's Personality and Anthropomorphization
1:12:55 - Hiring at Cline and Team Culture