I have tried most of the autonomous coding agents that have landed in VS Code over the last two years, and most of them ask you to trust a box. You type a request, something whirs, files change, and you find out afterward whether it understood you. Cline is the one that refuses to do that. It shows you the plan before it touches anything, asks before every file write and every terminal command, and prints the running token cost in the corner so you can watch the meter. I ran it as my primary agent for about two weeks on a real TypeScript monorepo and a smaller Rust side project, mostly on an M2 MacBook Air, and the experience was less "magic" and more "a junior pair who narrates everything." That is a compliment. Cline started life as Claude Dev — you will still see that name in older threads and screenshots — and it is fully open source, MIT-licensed, with the development happening in the open on GitHub. That single fact shapes everything about how it behaves.…