Cline
A coding agent inside VS Code: reads the project, edits files, runs commands, and shows every step before it applies.
Claude Code lives in the terminal — its strength and its barrier at once: plenty of people never go near a terminal. Cline does the same work inside the editor: a side panel, a diff in the window you already read diffs in, an apply button.
What it does: reads the project structure, edits several files at once, runs terminal commands, reaches the browser. The detail that matters is that it shows the change it intends to make before making it, and waits. For someone who does not yet trust an agent, that is the difference between "I'll try it" and "I won't".
It is not tied to one model: it works with several providers, Claude among them, so you pick the model to suit the task and the budget. There are builds for VS Code and for JetBrains editors, plus an SDK and a CLI if you want it inside your own process.
Sixty-seven thousand stars, Apache-2.0. Worth being clear that this is not a replacement for Claude Code but a different route to the same work: the terminal is faster and more precise for someone who lives there, the editor is legible to everyone else.
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