[krystofee]

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".

[danielbln]

I'm surprised you have to provide that much context manually. Cline (as do many other agentic coding assistants) uses treesitter to build a syntax tree and uses that to navigate the codebase and request which files it should open and load into the context. That in my experience works quite well. On the other hand, every codebase is different, so YMMV.

It's definitely not great when it comes to giant files. Now granted, those are an antipattern anyway, but sometimes it's just the way it is, and having diffing fail and then waiting while it burns through tokens trying to write out the whole file is a little meh.

That being said, I'm quite impressed overall. When it works it's quite wonderful, how it will use function calling to effectively hand VSCode control over to the LLM for spawning commands, reading the diagnostics etc.

For the multi-taskers among us, this is gold. Kicking off small atomic feature implementations in parallel, and hopping between Cline sessions is.. interesting.

[krystofee]

When you use it and it works, how detailed your prompts are? AND how much code can it output in one go?

[danielbln]

I prefer it to work on fairly narrowly scoped atomic features, and for those my prompts are quite minimal, or I do a short back and forth in "plan" mode until I'm happy with the plan.

For more complex features I do spec out the prompt in more detail.

The model can output at most 4k tokens I believe, though I think Cline will just run inference in multiple steps, so that shouldn't be a limitation that matters (only time/cost wise).