Cline

Agent ID: cline

Cline is a provider-agnostic coding agent (30+ providers, BYOK or cline.bot subscription). Speaks ACP natively via cline --acp.

Install

npm install -g cline
cline auth

Run cline auth to authenticate via cline.bot OAuth, or configure a provider key via cline config for bring-your-own-key usage.

The cline package must be installed as a peer - it is not bundled with agents-wire.

Quick Start

import { agents } from "@pivanov/agents-wire";

const result = await agents.ask(
  "cline",
  "Review src/auth.ts for security issues",
  {
    permission: "auto-allow",
  },
);

console.log(result.text);

Model Selection

Cline is provider-agnostic. The model list depends entirely on which provider you have configured (30+ supported). There is no cline models CLI subcommand, so the static catalog shows a "Default" placeholder pre-init.

After creating a session, read session.configOptions to discover which models the running Cline instance exposes:

import { createSession } from "@pivanov/agents-wire";

const session = await createSession("cline");
const opts = session.configOptions ?? [];
const modelOpt = opts.find((o) => o.configId === "model" && o.type === "select");

if (modelOpt && modelOpt.type === "select") {
  console.log(modelOpt.options); // provider-specific model list
}

options.model and options.effort are sent via ACP setSessionConfigOption (best-effort). Whether Cline honors them depends on the configured provider.

Capabilities

Feature	Supported
ask / stream / session	✅
askJson	✅
MCP stdio	✅
MCP http/sse	❌
Session listing (listSessions)	❌
Tool call interception	✅

Cost Tracking

Cost reporting depends on the configured provider. Token-priced providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) report per-turn costUsd. Subscription providers do not. Check result.cost and session.cost.snapshot to see what is available.

Auth Failure Detection

If cline auth has not been run or the provider key is invalid, the SDK catches the authentication-failure pattern in stderr and throws AgentUnauthenticatedError.

Gotchas

• Cline requires configuration before first use - run cline auth or cline config to set a provider.
• Model availability and effort support vary by provider. Use session.configOptions to discover what the running instance actually accepts.
• Session listing is not supported; listSessions() throws CapabilityNotSupportedError.