cline
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Saoud Rizwan
Saoud Rizwan is the founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent that runs inside code editors like VS Code. He built the first version in June 2024, about ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a side project for the company's Build with Claude hackathon. He didn't win, but the project caught fire online and Cline has since passed millions of installs and raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital and Pace Capital. Before Cline, Rizwan was a prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer. His pitch is unusually blunt for the AI era: Cline captures zero margin on AI usage, shows developers exactly what each request costs, and lets them bring their own models.
Cline
Cline is an open-source, autonomous AI coding agent that runs inside VS Code and other editors. It reads a codebase, plans changes, edits files across a project, runs terminal commands, and drives a browser - asking for the developer's approval at each step. Built to be transparent and model-agnostic, it lets teams bring their own API keys or run local models, and has grown into one of the most-installed AI coding tools with a Fortune 500 enterprise offering, Cline Teams.