Saoud Rizwan and Pash from Cline joined us to talk about why fast apply models got bitter lesson'd, how they pioneered the plan + act paradigm for coding, and why non-technical people use IDEs to do marketing and generate slides.
Full writeup: https://www.latent.space/p/cline
X: https://x.com/latentspacepod
Chapters:
00:00 - Introductions
01:35 - Plan and Act Paradigm
05:37 - Model Evaluation and Early Development of Cline
08:14 - Use Cases of Cline Beyond Coding
09:09 - Why Cline is a VS Code Extension and Not a Fork
12:07 - Economic Value of Programming Agents
16:07 - Early Adoption for MCPs
19:35 - Local vs Remote MCP Servers
22:10 - Anthropic's Role in MCP Registry
22:49 - Most Popular MCPs and Their Use Cases
25:26 - Challenges and Future of MCP Monetization
27:32 - Security and Trust Issues with MCPs
28:56 - Alternative History Without MCP
29:43 - Market Positioning of Coding Agents and IDE Integration Matrix
32:57 - Visibility and Autonomy in Coding Agents
35:21 - Evolving Definition of Complexity in Programming Tasks
38:16 - Forks of Cline and Open Source Regrets
40:07 - Simplicity vs Complexity in Agent Design
46:33 - How Fast Apply Got Bitter Lesson'd
49:12 - Cline's Business Model and Bring-Your-Own-API-Key Approach
54:18 - Integration with OpenRouter and Enterprise Infrastructure
55:32 - Impact of Declining Model Costs
57:48 - Background Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
1:00:42 - Vision and Multi-Modalities
1:01:07 - State of Context Engineering
1:07:37 - Memory Systems in Coding Agents
1:10:14 - Standardizing Rules Files Across Agent Tools
1:11:16 - Cline's Personality and Anthropomorphization
1:12:55 - Hiring at Cline and Team Culture
Chapters
- 00:00:00 Introduction and Guest Intros
- 00:00:29 What is Klein? Product Overview
- 00:01:42 Plan and Act Paradigm
- 00:05:22 Model Evolution and Building Klein
- 00:07:40 Beyond Coding: Klein as a General Agent
- 00:09:12 Why Focus on VS Code Extension?
- 00:11:26 The Future of Programming and Agentic Paradigm
- 00:12:34 Economic Value: Programming vs. Other Use Cases
- 00:16:04 MCP Ecosystem: Growth and Marketplace
- 00:21:30 Security, Discoverability, and Trust in MCPs
- 00:22:55 Popular MCPs and Workflow Automation
- 00:25:30 Monetization and Payments for MCPs
- 00:37:53 Competition, Forks, and Open Source Philosophy
- 00:40:39 RAG, Fast Apply, and Agentic Simplicity
- 00:50:11 Business Model and Enterprise Adoption
- 00:57:04 Background Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and CLI
- 01:00:41 Context Engineering and Memory
- 01:12:39 Team, Culture, and Closing Thoughts
