Cline is quietly eating Cursor's lunch and changing how we vibe code

Is the key here that with Cline, it's passing huge amounts of the code into context, unlike Cursor? So in some sense it's not surprising it does a better job, because it's executing much more expensive API calls to the LLM provider

Yes Cline is more reflective of the actual price of inference from frontier models. It's not realistic to offer 500 requests at $20/month without severely limiting what these models can do.

People who have become adamant Cline users over a significantly cheaper option have found the ROI of a higher performing AI coding tool far outweighs the inference costs. Even $500/month is negligible if it can 5x (or more) the output of a high-salary engineer.

Vibe coding started yesterday, so did Cursor. What Cline? Perhaps it's a little early to declare winners.

In your experiment, what was the cost of BYOK in cline?

Mine ranges around $2-20 per day depending on how much I use it and how complex the task and size of the project

That’s a lot compared to $20/month for cursor, no?

Yes, but Cursor usually doesn't solve the tasks I have