from Hacker News

I Use Cline for AI Engineering

by lobo_tuerto on 2/1/25, 5:31 PM with 30 comments

• by itchynosedev on 2/4/25, 11:36 AM

  Cline is a great alternative to Cursor if you are not willing to switch over to another (forked) editor.

  However, it's baffling to me that by default Cline ignores `pkg/` folder that is common in Go projects. Check this issue - https://github.com/cline/cline/issues/927

  I think Aider, Cline and Cursor are not far from each other in their capabilities.

  Cursor was probably the most polished experience - especially their `Tab` autocomplete. However, I found this effect really interesting. Let's say 7 out of 10 times it's seamless, but there's uncanny valley of autocomplete in 3 out of 10 times - where you expect it to the right thing, but it either predicts wrong or takes a tad too long, 'breaking the immersion', if you will.

  Cline does the job really well if you're in VSCode. Aider is great if you prefer terminal based workflow, or do not want to commit to another editor. Another great thing in Aider is `//AI!` comment. You can start Aider in --watch-files mode and it will watch for instructions, and start executing them. This way I can work in my preferred editor and have a tool in the background performing AI tasks.

  A slight edge in my case goes to Aider for this reason, despite the fact that it does not feel quite as polished as the other two.

• by trescenzi on 2/4/25, 1:31 PM

  Tangential but “AI Engineering” to me implies working on AI not with AI. The article has some solid examples of how this tool is helpful but if we’re going to start to call all software development done with LLM assistance AI Engineering, “AI” and “Engineering” are going to lose all meaning even faster than they currently are.

• by pityJuke on 2/4/25, 1:24 PM

  Cline/Roo & Aider with Claude 3.5 are certainly at the better end of AI programming assistance from my (limited!) experience.

  I do still find it the same 50/50 experience (maybe now closer to 65/45) as GH Copilot: sometimes whimsically amazing, sometimes horrifically confounding. And that’s not even with some of the complex code at work, that’s with some private, single file Python projects.

• by d4rkp4ttern on 2/4/25, 1:03 PM

  Roo Code (formerly Roo Cline) is a fork of Cline that gets rave reviews https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Code

• by byyoung3 on 2/4/25, 1:28 PM

  "Cline approaches AI assistance differently from most tools in the market" - I'm not trying to be a hater but I feel like it isn't that much different from cursor?

• by krystofee on 2/4/25, 12:37 PM

  From time to time, I use Cline for coding. In my perspective, LLM models are not yet there to grasp all of the complexities of designing any larger modular system. But what in my oppinion Cline does quite well is performing some mundane tasks that otherwise require me coding them. I tell it what I want to do, where it should be located and then I try to provide as much context in the initial prompt as I can in the form of files and class names that it should take inspiration from. If I do this properly, then its able to perform the coding task sufficiently.

  My problem with it is when its editing large files (1000+ LOC), because requests consume very many tokens AND it has problems editing the code so that sometimes its cycling infinitely trying to modify two lines in some function.

  Anyway, I like it more then Cursor, because of the controll I have over the model and in some subjective ways its more pleasing to me seeing it "work".

• by adamgordonbell on 2/4/25, 2:10 PM

  I've been using Windsurf's 'agent' type feature and liking it.

  It's great when it can self-check with tests and type-checking. Like 'upgrade this lib to the latest version and ensure everything is working after'.

  Occasionally, it will go off target, get distracted by parse errors, rewrite some areas unnecessarily, and forget the original goal. It can end up yak shaving, and losing context of the task.

  Agents also suck at global knowledge and will reimplement something that exists somewhere else, for instance. I have a rule: "Do information gathering first," which encourages it to look around a bit before making changes.

  Seeing the context size like cline does is useful. I think the flow action credits in windsurf are a custom model for applying changes, and hence the separation.

• by jacobpretorius on 2/4/25, 12:12 PM

  Cline is great, it has been my go-to ever since it came out. Works out far cheaper than Cursor would for my relatively low amount of coding, and I get to use all the stuff in VS I would anyway.

• by crestfallen33 on 2/4/25, 2:44 PM

  Cline has completely changed my approach to engineering. There's been this notion of "vibes" coding which I really resonate with -- using something like Cline I've found it performs better when I set a direction and let Cline fill in the gaps/details.

• by mrklol on 2/4/25, 2:00 PM

  Can one of these use "requests" via copilot? There are multiple usable models in copilot but it’s quite limited feature wise.

• by barrenko on 2/4/25, 11:31 AM

  Yupp, similar to what Karpathy is talking about on X (Twitter) lately.