Cline in VS Code: I used it two weeks on a TypeScript project and this survived
Back in 2005, when the internet café closed at 11pm and the place was packed, there was no time to read docs. You had to diagnose, run a command, see what happened, correct. That shaped something in me: deep respect for tools that let you see exactly what they're about to do before they do it, and deep suspicion toward anything that acts without warning you.
When I started evaluating autonomous coding agents in 2024, that same instinct pushed me to look at the permission model before any speed benchmark. Cline was the first one where I stopped for more than an hour configuring limits before writing a single real instruction.
My thesis, before going into detail: autonomous coding agents are not all the same, and Cline has a permission model that makes it more controllable than other tools — but the devil is in how you configure those limits, not in the tool itself. If you install Cline with defaults and ask it to refactor a complex module, you're going to have a radically different experience than if you invest 30 minutes defining what it can and can't touch.
What follows is an analysis based on two weeks of active use on a real TypeScript project, documenting delegated tasks, mistakes made, and configuration decisions. It's not a benchmark. There are no invented numbers. It's judgment earned through craft.
