Cline launches desktop coding agent with imports, schedules, and any-model support

Why it matters

Cline is turning a popular open-source extension into an independent agent surface, reducing its dependence on IDEs while giving ClinePass a direct route to developers.

Cline founder Saoud Rizwan (@sdrzn) launched a standalone desktop version of the open-source coding agent on September 14th, giving Cline its own interface outside an IDE. Cline Desktop is available in beta for macOS and Windows, with support for Cline accounts, outside API providers, and locally hosted models.

https://x.com/cline/status/2099536235350086029

Cline said in its launch thread that users can import tasks from Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and other coding agents, then continue those sessions with a different model. Cline Desktop also schedules recurring jobs such as pull request reviews, security scans, and documentation updates. A built-in marketplace manages plugins, Model Context Protocol servers, and reusable agent skills.

Rizwan started Cline in July 2024 after spending a week in his mother's garage in Terre Haute, Indiana, building a demo for an Anthropic hackathon. The demo did not win. Rizwan continued the project as an open-source coding agent that could read files, operate a terminal, and navigate a repository with a developer's approval.

Cline said it passed five million installations in January 2026. By September, Cline said it had migrated 11 million users of its VS Code extension to a new software development kit-based runtime. The figures use different labels - installations in January and users in September - so they do not establish how many active developers regularly use Cline. They do show how quickly Rizwan has expanded Cline from a hackathon project into a multi-interface product.

Cline gets out of the sidebar

The desktop release gives Cline control over parts of the user experience that an editor extension cannot fully own. Cline Desktop has its own onboarding, model picker, session archive, marketplace, scheduling interface, and account flow. Users can point Cline at a workspace and let the agent read files, make edits, execute commands, and track the current Git branch without opening VS Code.

Cline's open-source repository describes the desktop client as a Tauri application with a Bun sidecar and a Next.js interface. The same repository houses Cline's command-line tool, VS Code extension, software development kit, and desktop code, reflecting Rizwan's effort to run each interface on a shared agent core.

That shared runtime makes the import feature strategically useful. Cline is offering developers a way to leave another agent's interface without discarding their prior conversation. Once imported, the session resumes using the provider and model configured in Cline rather than the original tool's model. This lowers the practical cost of testing Cline against Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode on work already underway.

Cline Desktop also moves scheduled agents into a consumer-facing interface. Developers can set recurring prompts once and let Cline run them against a chosen workspace. Cline lists morning code reviews, nightly security checks, and weekly documentation work as examples. The desktop app maintains those runs alongside sessions started through Cline's other interfaces.

The beta is moving quickly. Cline's GitHub release page listed version 0.0.27 on September 14th, following multiple September builds. Recent release notes include fixes for imported histories, scheduled sessions, provider authentication, Windows behavior, and web search. Cline warns on the download page that users should expect rough edges.

ClinePass gets a desktop storefront

The provider picker is also a distribution channel for ClinePass, Rizwan's subscription bundle for open-weight models. Cline priced ClinePass at $9.99 per month when it introduced the service in June, promising a curated model catalog and higher rate limits across Cline's interfaces. The desktop launch promotes ClinePass alongside free models including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Muse Spark 1.3.

Cline Desktop retains the bring-your-own-key approach that helped Cline spread among developers who wanted control over model choice and spending. Users can connect Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, open-weight providers, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, or local inference tools. Cline says users can switch models during a project rather than rebuilding a workflow around a single provider.

That flexibility sits beside a changing business model. When Cline announced $32 million in combined seed and Series A funding in July 2025, Rizwan wrote that "inference cannot be the business model." Emergence Capital and Pace Capital led those rounds, with participation from 1984 Ventures, Essence VC, Cox Exponential, and individual investors.

ClinePass now gives Cline recurring revenue tied directly to model access, though Cline continues to let users bypass that subscription with their own credentials or local hardware. Cline Desktop puts both paths in the same product: Cline can sell a convenient model bundle while preserving the provider independence that attracted its open-source user base.

The desktop beta therefore carries more weight than another interface option. Rizwan is turning Cline from an extension that lives inside somebody else's editor into a standalone place where developers choose models, recover sessions from competing agents, install tools, and automate recurring engineering work. Cline now owns the window where those decisions happen.