Cline Blog
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Why AI Engineers Need Planning More Than Perfect Prompts
The best AI engineers I know follow a specific pattern. They don't obsess over prompt crafting – they obsess over planning. There's a reason for this, and it's not what most people think. The Reality Check Here's what typically happens when someone starts working with AI: 1. They throw requirements at the model 2. They get mediocre outputs 3. They blame their prompting skills 4. They spend hours "optimizing" prompts 5. They still get mediocre results Sound familiar? But here's what eli
Everyone's Talking About R1 vs o1 Benchmarks. But Here's What Really Matters.
In an interesting coincidence, DeepSeek released R1 on the same day we launched Plan & Act modes in Cline. And something fascinating started happening immediately: developers began naturally using R1 for planning phases and 3.5-Sonnet for implementation. Not because anyone suggested it – it just made sense. 0:00 /0:54 1× What's Actually Happening Here's what developers discovered works best: 1. Start new tasks in Plan mode using R1 ($0.55/M tokens)
The Developer's Guide to MCP: From Basics to Advanced Workflows
Picture this: You're deep into development with your AI assistant, trying to juggle multiple tools – GitHub issues need updating, tests need running, and documentation needs reviewing. But instead of the seamless workflow you imagined, you're stuck with manual context switching and disconnected tools. Your AI assistant, brilliant as it is, feels trapped in its chat window. This is where the Model Context Protocol (MCP) changes everything. It's not just another developer tool – it's a fundamenta
Best AI Coding Assistant 2025: Complete Guide to Cline and Cursor
Updated March 4, 2025 article to reflect recent developments Remember when GitHub Copilot first launched and we thought AI-assisted coding couldn't get more revolutionary? Two years later, we're seeing a fascinating divergence in how AI coding assistants approach development. With recent releases from both Cline (now 3.5) and Cursor (0.46), we're witnessing not just a battle of features, but a philosophical split in how AI should partner with developers. I've watched both tools mature. Let's c
DeepSeek's Wild Week: A View from the Developer Trenches
Last week, Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek, caused the biggest single-day drop in NVIDIA's history, wiping nearly $600 billion from the chip giant's market value. But while Wall Street panicked about DeepSeek's cost claims, Cline users in our community were discovering a more nuanced reality. The Promise vs The Reality "R1 is so hesitant to open and read files while Claude just bulldozes through them," observed one of our users. This perfectly captures the gap between DeepSeek's impressive bench
The Local LLM Reality Check: What Actually Happens When You Try to Run AI Models on Your Computer
If you've used DeepSeek's R1 (or V3 for that matter), you've probably been impressed at its performance for the price. And if you've run into issues with its API recently, your next thought was probably, “Hey, I’ve got a decent computer—maybe I can run this locally and run this myself!” Then reality hits: the full DeepSeek R1 model needs about 1,342 GB of VRAM—no, that’s not a typo. It’s designed to run on a cluster of 16 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, each with 80GB of memory (source). Let’s break down wha
What AI Companies Actually Need Right Now
At Cline, we've scaled to 500k+ users and raised significant funding from top-tier VCs. As Head of AI, I recently interviewed a strong ML engineer candidate. Despite their solid background, I voted "no hire." Let me explain why - it reveals a broader pattern about what AI companies actually need right now, and getting this wrong can be a $200k+ mistake. The $200k Mistake: Why Hiring MLEs Too Early Kills AI Startups Here's a pattern I see repeatedly in well-funded AI startups: 1. Raise a sub
The Last AI Coding Agent
It feels like every month there's a new "must-have" AI coding tool. The FOMO is real; but so is the fatigue of constantly switching, learning new workflows, and migrating settings. It’s exhausting, but that's the price for developers who want to be armed with the greatest leverage powered by AI. The magic of AI coding isn't just in the tool itself; it's in the power of the underlying model. And the "best" model is a moving target. One year ago, GPT-4o led the way. Then Anthropic's Claude 3.5 So
Why Human Intent Matters More as AI Capabilities Grow
Remember when AI coding meant tab autocomplete? The human did 95% of the work: navigating the codebase, finding the right files, locating the exact spot to edit, beginning to type, and only then could AI offer a helpful suggestion. The human was the driver, AI was barely a passenger. Today's agentic AI can search codebases, read files, write entire modules, refactor systems, and orchestrate complex changes across multiple files. With tools like Cline, AI has eaten up nearly the entire coding pi
Cline 3.17.9: Enhanced Claude 4 Support (Experimental), Upgraded Task Timeline & CSV/XLSX Support
Hello Cline community 🫡 We've been burning the candle at both ends to make Cline work as well as possible with the new Claude 4 family of models, and we're excited to share that Cline 3.17.9 includes experimental Claude 4 support that addresses reliability issues, an upgraded task timeline with scrolling navigation, and expanded file upload capabilities for data analysis. Experimental Claude 4 Support If you've been using Claude 4 with Cline, you've probably noticed some frustrating edit fai
Why We Built Cline to Never Hold You Hostage
Yesterday, Windsurf users lost access to Claude 3.x models with five days' notice. OpenAI's acquisition of Windsurf created competitive tensions with Anthropic, and developers got caught in the crossfire. Picture this: you're deep into a critical project, and suddenly your AI coding assistant is crippled by corporate politics. Free tier users lost access entirely; paid subscribers face severe capacity constraints. This validates why we built Cline differently from day one. When Corporate War
What Makes a Coding Agent?
When developers first encounter Cline, they often describe it as their "AGI moment" – that pivotal instant when they realize AI has crossed from helpful suggestion tool to genuine coding partner. But what exactly separates a true coding agent from the growing crowd of AI-powered development tools? The answer lies in understanding what the word "agent" actually means. Defining the Agent OpenAI defines an agent as "a system that independently accomplishes tasks on your behalf." Anthropic takes