Saoud Rizwan, a key contributor at Cline, chats about developing innovative coding agents and enhancing VS Code through their open-source extension. He discusses the plan + act paradigm, which revolutionizes coding interactions. The conversation also dives into the surprising use of IDEs by non-tech users for marketing tasks. Challenges in monetizing the Model Code Plugin ecosystem and the evolving complexity of programming tasks are also highlighted, providing intriguing insights into the future of coding and automation.
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00:00 / 00:00
Plan and Act Paradigm Innovated
Cline pioneered the plan and act paradigm, separating planning and execution in coding agents.
This improves agent interaction by allowing focused exploration before taking action, enhancing effectiveness.
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Building Slide Deck with Cline
Pash used Cline to build an entire presentation slide deck by providing style guidelines and agenda notes.
This shows Cline's versatility beyond coding, capable of complex JavaScript tasks like presentation assembly.
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Programming Holds Highest Economic Value
Programming remains the highest economic value use case for language models.
Cline acts as a single contact point to manage posts, bug fixes, and deploys using natural language workflows.
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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
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast 