I really liked Cline until I tried Claude Code. CC being sort of "closer to the metal" in terms of API access to Claude and effectivelly no mediating interface really introduced a major philosophical change in how I think about AI coding.
For Cline though, I think what it got right is realizing you can use the VS Code API and smart prompting in order to basically bootstrap an "agentic" tool. Cursor and Windsurf I think had these features a bit ago, but were also sort of hamstrung at the time by the models themselves. Cline benefited from smart prompting by its developers in confluence with model advances, making the value prop be really murky as to why I would use something like Cursor/Windsurf. However, VS Code now directly supports Cline-type behavior without Cline [0] so IMO I think a lot of these tools that are basicaly glamorized prompt wrappers aren't long for the world.
kkukshtel|10 months ago
For Cline though, I think what it got right is realizing you can use the VS Code API and smart prompting in order to basically bootstrap an "agentic" tool. Cursor and Windsurf I think had these features a bit ago, but were also sort of hamstrung at the time by the models themselves. Cline benefited from smart prompting by its developers in confluence with model advances, making the value prop be really murky as to why I would use something like Cursor/Windsurf. However, VS Code now directly supports Cline-type behavior without Cline [0] so IMO I think a lot of these tools that are basicaly glamorized prompt wrappers aren't long for the world.
[0] https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...