Link: Why I use Cline for AI Engineering - by Addy Osmani
In this post Addy describes his use of Cline (Jan 30). It was the first time I'd heard of it. I was kinda surprised because I've been on top of tooling for a while now.
For the longest time I'd been using Replit, it had a nice flow to it. I could ask it to help me solve a problem and it would just apply the code to the project. For me, it was a nice way to get things done.
I liked Replit, I built a lot of apps with it, however their hosting is expensive and their new checkpoint based pricing model frustrated me, especially when it made very clear mistakes.
At the time (like two weeks ago) Copilot didn't apply any changes to the code, it just suggested things which I had to then copy and paste... and even then the suggestions just weren't that good.
Cline has replaced both Copilot and Replit.
I don't mind paying for the use of an LLM and as noted by Addy:
I’ve also deeply appreciated Cline’s proactive accounting of cost during a session. This is most notable when switching between model providers:
I love that I can see where the costs are coming from. I can see how much I am spending on the model and how much I am spending on the compute. It's a nice touch.
When you add this with something else Addy points out:
The DeepSeek-R1 + Sonnet hybrid approach Recent benchmarks and user experiences have shown that combining DeepSeek-R1 for planning with Claude 3.5 Sonnet for implementation can reduce costs by up to 97% while improving overall output quality.
It's a pretty compelling solution.
My own workflow at the moment has be to plan with R1 (via OpenRouter) and then implement with Sonnet. I personally don't look at the costs, but I do inspect the output a lot and this has felt like a pretty good balance for my personal projects.
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