I Use Cline for AI Engineering
5 comments
·February 1, 2025itchynosedev
ai-christianson
In their tool comparison section they did mention aider, but they did but mention RA.Aid (https://github.com/ai-christianson/RA.Aid, Apache 2.0), which puts aider in a full-fledged development agent.
The experience of using RA.Aid is similar to using cline (or Devin), but it is a simple CLI command and not tied to any IDE. In fact you could use tmux, nvim, and RA.Aid in chat mode and have an experience that is not far off from vscode with cline, cursor, or windsurf.
elashri
Have you tried windsrf ( or more questionable trae)? They seem to be cursor alternative. I would like to know how they would compare it terms of UX to cline and cursor which I did not use. Aider is nice but I didn't try it much because I used it with Gemini API and aider complained about more deviating too much. So probably not aider fault.
jacobpretorius
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.
barrenko
Yupp, similar to what Karpathy is talking about on X (Twitter) lately.
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.