Cline

Cline is an autonomous coding agent that lives inside your editor. Its defining choice is transparency: every file edit, terminal command, and browser action is proposed and shown as a diff before anything happens, so you approve changes rather than discover them.

How it works

• Plan and Act modes. Plan mode explores the codebase and proposes an approach with no write access; Act mode carries it out. Separating the two prevents the common failure where an agent starts editing before it understands the problem.
• Bring your own model. Cline is model-agnostic — point it at any major provider, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or a local model. You pay the provider directly rather than a per-seat markup.
• MCP support. Connect Model Context Protocol servers to give the agent access to your database, issue tracker, browser, or internal APIs, and let it install new ones on request.
• Terminal and browser control. It runs commands, reads the output, and can drive a headless browser to check its own work on a running app.
• Checkpoints. Snapshots of the workspace let you roll back to any point in a task.

Why teams pick it

It is fully open source, works in both VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, and keeps costs visible and controllable because you supply the model. Good for developers who want agentic speed without giving up review discipline.