I’ve been exploring various AI coding tools, but recently I discovered something that genuinely excited me - Cline, a VSCode extension that brings a whole new level of AI-assisted development to your fingertips. Let me share my experience building a project with it.

What is Cline?

Cline is not just another AI coding assistant. It’s a VSCode extension that integrates with OpenRouter to connect with powerful language models like Anthropic’s Claude. What makes it special is how it understands your entire project context and can help with everything from project setup to deployment.

The key differentiator? Cline doesn’t just suggest code snippets - it actively helps you architect solutions, write implementations, handle errors, and even write documentation. It’s like having a senior developer pair programming with you, but one that can see and understand your entire codebase at once.

My Experience: Building a URL Shortener in One Hour

To test Cline’s capabilities, I decided to build a URL shortening service. The results were astounding - the entire project took only about an hour from initial setup to deployment! Here’s what we built:

  • A full-stack TypeScript/Express.js application
  • Frontend for URL input and display
  • Backend API with Vercel KV (Redis) storage
  • Automatic fallback to memory storage for local development
  • Complete deployment configuration for Vercel
  • Comprehensive documentation

The most impressive part? Cline helped with every aspect of the development:

  • Project structure setup
  • Code implementation
  • Error handling
  • Deployment configuration
  • Documentation writing

You can check out the project here: short-url-website

Why Cline Excites Me

  1. Full Project Understanding Unlike other AI tools that work with snippets or single files, Cline understands your entire project context. It can navigate through files, understand dependencies, and make informed suggestions based on your whole codebase.

  2. Practical and Production-Ready The code Cline helps you write isn’t just for demos - it’s production-ready. In my URL shortener project, it helped implement proper error handling, storage abstractions, and even considered local development experience.

  3. Beyond Just Coding Cline doesn’t just help with coding - it assists with the entire development lifecycle. From project setup to deployment configuration to documentation, it’s like having an AI architect, developer, and technical writer all in one.

  4. Cost-Effective For my entire URL shortener project, the AI usage cost was only about $6 (6.7M input tokens, 22K output tokens). That’s incredible value for the amount of work accomplished.

The Future of Development?

This experience has made me rethink how AI can enhance software development. Cline isn’t trying to replace developers - instead, it amplifies our capabilities by handling the routine aspects of development while letting us focus on the creative and strategic decisions.

The most exciting part? This is just the beginning. As language models continue to improve, tools like Cline will become even more powerful. I’m particularly impressed with how it uses Claude-3.5-sonnet through OpenRouter, and I can only imagine what future iterations will bring.

Try It Yourself

If you’re interested in experiencing this new way of development, I highly recommend giving Cline a try. It’s not just another coding tool - it’s a glimpse into the future of software development.

You can find Cline here: https://github.com/cline/cline

And if you want to see a real example of what you can build with it, check out my URL shortener project: https://github.com/wbingli/short-url-website

(Written by Cline itself!!!)