• New name: Meet Cline, an AI assistant that can use your CLI aNd Editor. While “Claude Dev” was a tribute to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, v2.0 brings updates that significantly improve performance across other models making it a good opportunity to give the extension its own identity.

• No more staring at loading spinners: Responses are now streamed into the editor + a yellow text decoration animation to keep track of Cline’s progress as he edits files. Watching Cline work feels like magic and I’m so incredibly excited for you all to experience it.

• Cancel button: With the new streaming feature, you can now Cancel mid-generation to give Cline feedback if he goes off in the wrong direction. This gives you more control over tasks, leading to the results you want faster.

• 40% fewer requests to accomplish tasks + better performance with other models: This update replaces the rigid tool use API with a customized XML tags approach, allowing for more flexible tool interactions and significantly improving results for non-Claude models. Behind the scenes, older versions of the extension used an API feature called “Tool Use” (AKA “Function Calling”) where tools like read_file and execute_command were defined in a strict JSON schema sent with each request, requiring models to respond with a structured output that had to fit into this schema. While some models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet are heavily fine-tuned to be good at this, other models like Llama and DeepSeek are not as adept, often leading to inability to complete even the most basic tasks. This not only limited the extension’s accessibility with other models, but also diminished Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s potential as forcing any model to respond in structured output has been proven to have negative qualitative effects. To eliminate these bottlenecks while still giving models the ability to invoke tools, I took inspiration from this study showing how prompt-engineering can enable stable tool-calling capabilities + Anthropic’s prompt to achieve their Artifacts feature (uses tags like <antArtifact>) to create a completely re-imagined system prompt where models are effectively fine-tuned on the spot how to best interact with Cline’s toolset. Instead of having to respond in a rigid JSON format, models can now invoke tools in unstructured text with XML tags like <read_file> and <execute_command>. Since we define the tool use guidelines ourselves we can even tailor it with context like “these tools are executed upon the user's approval” instead of relying on the generalized internal prompts that Anthropic uses to achieve tool calling for their API. To quantify the improvement these changes made, I ran a simple benchmark: I gave the following task in a Next.js app “Implement a dark mode toggle feature, and save the user’s preference to persist across sessions” and measured the # of requests until the task was successfully completed. This was a practical scenario that tested models’ abilities to use the appropriate tools to explore an existing project’s source code, apply edits, and debug issues that came up along the way. Claude 3.5 Sonnet saw a ~40% reduction in # of requests required to accomplish the task, while other models like Llama and DeepSeek are now not only able to tool call more reliably but seem to have a greater capacity to reason about executing tasks successfully. While the native tool calling API was a core feature of earlier versions of the extension, it’s become clear that it limited the models' performance. The more flexibility the models have in generating responses, the better the outcomes. Although it’s more work on the extension’s part to parse the XML tool invocations, it is certainly worth the trouble.

• Search and use any OpenRouter model: the extension automatically fetches the latest model list + pricing details, giving you access to the newest models as soon as they’re available. Try searching “free” to find no-cost options.

• Apache 2.0 License: Changed the project’s license from MIT to Apache 2.0 to provide stronger open-source protections for the future development of the project. Thank you contributors for making this a smooth process.

• New README and got a cool domain for the project https://cline.bot (wip). On a final note, I also wanted to share that I’m now working on Cline full-time and am excited to keep improving the extension and make it the best thing it can possibly be. Thank you all for the incredible support around the project.

–Saoud