Cline

Started as a one-week hackathon demo called Claude Dev and shipped as an Apache-2.0 VS Code extension that reads files, runs terminal commands and edits across a project. It is model-agnostic — Claude, GPT, Gemini, a local Ollama server or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — and by 2026 it had raised $32M and expanded to a desktop app, a CLI and an SDK.

Who built itSaoud Rizwan came to Cline from iOS development: his Swift library Disk, for persisting structs, images and data on iOS, dates from 2017 and has 3,113 stars on GitHub. He wrote the first version himself — a week in his mother’s garage in Terre Haute for an Anthropic hackathon the demo did not win — and is still the repository’s top contributor at 2,746 commits, about 2.8 times the second-ranked account. The company he founded around it, Cline Bot Inc., announced a $32M seed and Series A in July 2025 and described a team of more than 35 people in January 2026.

1. 01

   One week in a garage for an Anthropic hackathon

   22 days from repository creation to first release

   Saoud Rizwan wrote in a 2026-01-30 blog post that in July 2024 he spent a week in his mother’s garage in Terre Haute building a demo for an Anthropic hackathon, with one idea: give the model the same tools a developer uses — file access, terminal commands, the ability to navigate a codebase the way a person would. The demo did not win. The repository was created on 2024-07-06 with a first commit message of “Update view names”, and version v1.0.4 shipped 22 days later on 2024-07-28 under the name Claude Dev, with the command-palette entry `Claude Dev: Open In New Tab`. That version already included an `analyze_project` tool, 8192 output tokens and retries for failed requests.

2. 02

   Renaming to Cline and dropping the tool-use API

   The GitHub organisation `cline` was created on 2024-10-07, two days before version v2.0.0 on 2024-10-09. The release note announced the new name: Cline is “CLI” plus “Editor”, and while “Claude Dev” had been a tribute to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, v2.0 improved performance across other models, which the note gives as the reason to give the extension its own identity. The same version replaced the rigid tool-use API with custom XML tags; the release note states that this cut the number of requests by 40%.

3. 03

   Auto-approve, and a post about not indexing the codebase

   Version v3.0.0 on 2024-12-18 was built around auto-approve, described in the release as the feature Cline users had asked for most, which lets the agent work without approving each step. On 2025-05-27 the project published “Why Cline doesn’t index your codebase”; the Hacker News thread on it drew 178 points and 124 comments. A thread from 2025-01-26, “Using AI for Coding: My Journey with Cline and LLMs”, drew 198 points and 91 comments.

4. 04

   A $32M raise, with the numbers attached

   On 2025-07-31 the company announced $32M across a Series A and a seed round, led by Emergence Capital and Pace Capital, with 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential and individual investors participating; the company behind the project is Cline Bot Inc., per the site’s copyright line. The announcement, signed by Saoud Rizwan, listed 2.7 million installs, 48k GitHub stars, 48k followers on X and 20k Discord members at that date. It states the company’s position in one line: “Our thesis is simple: inference cannot be the business model.”

5. 05

   Past five million installs, then a desktop app

   A 2026-01-30 blog post announced more than 5 million installs and a $1M open-source grant program, and gave 57,000 GitHub stars and a team of over 35 people. Version v4.0.0 on 2026-06-26 moved tasks onto a shared Cline SDK session layer through an SDK-driven VS Code extension runtime. On 2026-09-14 the project announced Cline Desktop, an open-source app for open-weight models, describing Cline as having started as a VS Code extension and now being used by more than 11 million developers; the latest release is desktop-v0.0.37 from 2026-09-26. As of 2026-09-27 the GitHub API reports 69,446 stars, 7,532 forks, 1,477 open issues and 330 contributors, across 432 releases tagged `desktop-*`, `cli-*` and `v*`.

6. 06

   A tampered npm release, three advisories, and a rumour

   The repository carries three GitHub security advisories: GHSA-9ppg-jx86-fqw7 (low, 2026-02-17), for `cline@2.3.0` being published to npm without authorization with a modified postinstall script; GHSA-5c57-rqjx-35g2 (critical, 2026-05-08), a cross-origin WebSocket hijack in Cline Kanban Server; and GHSA-3cj3-hqcr-g934 (high, 2026-06-23), the same class of issue in Cline Hub Dashboard. A Hacker News post on 2026-02-18 was titled “Cline Supply Chain Attack: Cline 2.3.0 Silently Installs OpenClaw”. On 2026-01-29 a competitor’s blog post asked whether Cline had been acqui-hired by OpenAI; the same page carries an update stating that Cline clarified it was operational and that there was no transaction with OpenAI.