The company blog of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent for VS Code, covering features, benchmarks, and local model setups.
Commenters recommend Cline as a coding tool, praise its task restore feature, and discuss its post on why it doesn't index codebases.
About 6 months ago I became incredibly interested in game theory, especially as it relates to playing poker. Myself, a mediocre poker player, have only been playing for about a year.
When I discovered that most online poker sites allow you to export your hand history, I was shook! Over the weekend, I built this site and got it online. It's massively scalable and HA. All the infra is in terraform. Everything is in Alembic. All the code is fairly high performance. And, all of it was vibed coded.
Most important is that all the infra to the best of my knowledge follows all the AWS cloud best practices.
Following a blog from earlier in the year, I discovered the workflow of having GenAI to help me craft my prompts for GenAI. At first, it served as a recommendation engine for options for features I hadn't imagined. (https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/)
It transformed into a process where I used the prompts and further iteration in Cline's plan mode to build really useful features, testing first, and with all the Markdown documentation I care to generate. (https://cline.bot/)
This meant I was able to move at incredible speed relative to my normal development cycle, and built a reasonably attractive, actually useful site in about 2 days.
Anyways. I don't have friends IRL so I'm sharing with HN
Create an account if you want to try the AI agent. There is no spam and no email confirmation. Here is an example "phh" datafile if you don't have one yourself:…
Someone pointed me to this post from Cline engineer - below is my response to that
Post: https://cline.bot/blog/why-cline-doesnt-index-your-codebase-and-why-thats-a-good-thing
That post however does not apply to offline processing use case. Here are his 3 main problem points they re trying to solve:
Code Doesn't Think in Chunks
But then he is describing follow semantic links through imports, etc. -> that technique is still hierarchical chunking, and I am planning to implement that as well: it's straightforward.
2. Indexes Decay While Code Evolves
This is just not true - there are multiple ways to solve it. One, for example, is continuous indexing at low priority in the background. Another one - monitoring for file changes and reindexing only differences, etc. I already implemented first iteration for this: index remains current.
3. Security Becomes a Liability (and then goes into embeddings to be stored somewhere)
We are talking about offline mode of operation. Not with Aye Chat: it implements embedding store locally - with ChromaDB and ONNXMiniLM_L6_V2 model.
So as you can see - none of his premises apply here.
And then as part of solution he claims that "context window does not matter because Claude and ChatGPT models are now into 1M context window" - but once again that does not apply to locally hosted models: I am getting 32K context with Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B on my non-optimized setup with 8Gb VRAM.
The main thing why I think it may work is the following:…
> Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.
They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation.
I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish).
We’ve been heads-down building and testing Fei, our autonomous engineering agent, and wanted to share the launch. Over the last months, we pushed Fei across a wide variety of projects to see how well our Agentic Context Engine (ACE) personalizes to each repo.
What we found is that the way you build an agent matters a lot:
We developed our approach to work so that the agents doesn't fall apart because of cascading errors - as discussed here https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
There's been talks like this https://cline.bot/blog/why-cline-doesnt-index-your-codebase-and-why-thats-a-good-thing pushing to avoid indexing the whole codebase. We actually saw the opposite in practice: many real-world repos have design system components spread across folders, external library setups, overlapping responsibilities, and inconsistent component usage. Without holistic context, you miss critical signals.
We see that our agent consistently generates backend-ready code that reuses components, respects design systems, and adapts to how each repo is actually structured—not just a “hello world” demo.
Would love your support on PH!
Curious if others here have had good success with agents reusing existing functionality not explicitly mentioned in the chat during AI agent flows?
There are going to be a lot of tools coming soon that are "agent-agnostic", i.e. can run on CLIs including Claude Code. I am personally experimenting with using a combo of MCP + custom UI layer to provide custom tools with bespoke UX and thus turn Claude Code (or any other CLI agent for that matter) into whatever I want. I wonder how they'll deal with that.
For a good existing example developed by a known company, check Cline Kanban: https://cline.bot/kanban
They don't have the MCP-bundling idea that I'm experimenting with, however.
Cline gives you the ability to jump back to any point in the task. The three options are "Restore task", "restore files" and "restore task and files"
A common experience with these tools is that if you realize you want to change the direction you're heading, it's better to jump back to that point in the work and redo it than it is to try to redirect the tool from where you are. Here's a great post about it on the Cline blog
https://cline.bot/blog/how-i-learned-to-stop-course-correcting-and-start-using-message-checkpoints