Roo Code
OSS VS Code agentic extension — Cline fork that diverged with custom modes (Architect, Code, Ask, Debug). Memory via .roorules + Memory Bank. Smaller community than Cline but persistent contributor base.
At a glance
- Type
- OSS VS Code agentic extension (fork of Cline)
- Tier
- T3
- Section
- Agent IDEs & coding harnesses
- Created
- 2024-08 (forked from Cline)
- Latest release
- Roo Code 3.x rolling
- License
- Apache-2.0
- GitHub
- ~10k★, TypeScript
- Pricing
- Free (OSS); usage via LLM provider
- Funding
- not applicable — OSS / no commercial entity
Taxonomy
- storage
- file
- retrieval
- injection
- persistence
- cross-session
- update
- hybrid
- unit
- document
- governance
- inspectable
- conflict
- human-arbitrate
When to use
Optimised for: Cline + modes (Architect/Code/Ask/Debug)
Anti-fit: smaller community than Cline; fork-maintenance risk
Pros & cons
Pros
Adds the "modes" pattern on top of Cline's plan/act; permissive license.
Cons
Fork-of-a-fork dynamics — risks diverging from upstream Cline; small core maintainer team.
Claims & capabilities
Cline fork; ~10k★; introduced "modes" pattern (Architect/Code/Ask/Debug).
Technical surface
- API surface
- VS Code extension
- Backend storage
- local workspace + .roorules
- Deployment
- VS Code extension
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- per-user
- MCP
- native (inherited from Cline)
- A2A
- searched not found
- OpenTelemetry
- searched not found
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Related systems
References (1)
- OpenAI GPT family (GPT-5 / GPT-4o / o3 / o4) depends on at runtime — adjacent-infrastructure cell: OpenAI-compatible APIs