Cline is, hands down, the most effective agentic coding tool out there. I've extensively daily driven any one of them you can name, and there's nothing even close. The reality is that no one knows how any of this stuff should work, and RAG is just a term that was made up a few years ago; it has no strict formal definition. There's a long way to go before anyone knows what the correct way to do things should be, but they are clearly on the right path from direct experience.
That’s not universally true. I’ve had a better experience with Amazon Q than I’ve had with Cline.
What are the options?
Cursor, Zed, Cline (VSCode), and anything else?
I have not tried either. I wanted to try Cursor but it has a bug that is a blocker.
My workflow involves manual copying and pasting from the browser into my own text editor.
>My workflow involves manual copying and pasting from the browser into my own text editor.
Cline with mcp-playwright: https://github.com/executeautomation/mcp-playwright
There is no free tier like other tools, but it's far more transparent in that regard; it uses an Anthropic/OpenAI/etc. API key directly, and your only costs are direct token usage.
The real "aha" moment with this kind of thing is in realizing that the agent can not just use the tool as provided, but it can write scripts to dynamically execute on the page as well. So it's not just going to a page and dumping a bunch of HTML back into the client; it actually analyzes the DOM structure and writes JS snippets to extract relevant information which are then executed in the browser's runtime.
Amazon Q CLI, Claude Code CLI, Goose with any model, OpenAPI released Codex CLI recently, and Google released Jules.
You can also just use Claude Desktop and hook it up to MCP servers.
I still need to catch up on MCPs, it is still new to me and truth be told, I am clueless about it.
I agree. This is the golden tool that doesn't get the hype. Well as golden as tools get. Hope they can keep delivering. It seems to hit my personal sweet spot.
How is it better than Claude Code? I have decent experience with CC, but haven't used Cline. Are there good tutorials for best practices with it?
What's incredible to me is that it's open source. I've learned a ton about prompting and agent workflows, tool use, etc. from its code.