cline

Cline is an AI coding agent that lives inside VS Code and actually does things. Not autocomplete. Not suggestions in a ghost text overlay. It reads your project, edits files, runs terminal commands, launches a browser, and debugs runtime errors, all with your approval at every step. The human-in-the-loop design means nothing happens without your explicit sign-off.

You bring your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, or a dozen other providers, point it at the model you want, and let it loose. It supports MCP, so you can extend its capabilities with custom tools. Basically a junior dev pair programmer that never gets tired and never pushes code without asking. GitHub Copilot is the obvious comparison, but Cline goes deeper: it does not just suggest lines, it executes multi-step tasks end to end. Cursor offers similar agentic features but locks you into their editor.

The catch: you are paying for every API call yourself, and on complex tasks those tokens add up fast.