Cline shipped v4.0.0 on June 26, 2026, a major version that jumps from v3.89.2 (June 11) and reframes what Cline is. Where the 3.x line was a VS Code extension that grew a CLI alongside it, 4.0 makes the shared Cline SDK the engine for everything and ports the VS Code extension onto it. Cline now describes itself as "the open source coding agent in your IDE and terminal," and the README is explicit that the SDK is "the same engine that runs the CLI, Kanban, VS Code extension, and JetBrains plugin." The extension rewrite is the headline; the subscription, marketplace, and plugin layers are what turn the rewrite into a platform bet.
The SDK migration: one engine across four surfaces
The core change in 4.0 is that the VS Code extension no longer runs its own legacy task implementation. Agent turns, tools, Plan/Act mode coordination, MCP, checkpoints, telemetry, provider changes, compaction, mistake limits, and task history now route through the shared SDK session layer. The extension build and package workflow also moves to Bun, which Cline already uses across the rest of the repo.
The architecture payoff is consistency. The Cline CLI (now on its own v3.0.x line, at cli-v3.0.31 as of June 27), the Kanban parallel-agent task board, the JetBrains plugin, and the VS Code extension all share one runtime, so a behavior fix or a tool change lands in every surface instead of being reimplemented per client. Plan/Act handling is reworked through SDK coordinators with closer CLI parity and automatic continuation when switching from Plan to Act. Terminal execution is simplified through the SDK run-commands path, with safer structured command formatting and clearer non-interactive guidance. The same consolidation logic is what drove OpenAI to build a governable platform around Codex 0.142 earlier this week, and the broader pattern of coding agents moving from single-surface tools to SDK-first platforms is now the default shape of the category.
ClinePass: a managed subscription inside the extension
The most user-visible product change is ClinePass. It is a built-in subscription and onboarding flow in the VS Code extension, covering provider selection, signup and subscription handoff, live model lists, entitlement and organization error states, out-of-credit prompts, and clearer ClinePass auth and error handling. Generic SDK provider settings and model-catalog support mean more providers can share the same model picker, reasoning controls, dynamic model IDs, and custom model handling.
Read plainly, Cline now ships a managed path: subscribe, pick a model, run. That is a shift for a project that built its audience on "bring your own API key," and it is the same shift the rest of the category has made as coding agents moved from hobbyist tooling to managed products. BYO-key providers are not removed; they sit alongside the managed flow, and the new providers.json plus shared model catalog is designed to preserve settings across provider switches.
Customize marketplace and Cline Plugins
The Customize marketplace consolidates Skills, MCP servers, and Plugins into one interface, with installed and marketplace tabs, search and filtering, install and uninstall flows, and enable and disable controls. It also supports plugin-bundled skills and can be reorganized under a Customize entry point.
Cline Plugins are the new extensibility primitive. They let you extend Cline with custom tools, workflows, skills, and MCP-powered capabilities tailored to a team or project, and they can be installed mid-session. MCP support now extends to plugins, and the MCP hub refreshes automatically after a marketplace install, so a newly installed server is available without a manual restart. The MCP Marketplace tab can also be disabled remotely while installed MCP servers remain accessible. This is the same extensibility vector that Claude Code, Codex, and the opencode desktop release have been converging on: a plugin and MCP layer that turns a coding agent into something teams can customize without forking it.
Queued prompts, provider rework, and safer defaults
A batch of developer-facing improvements rounds out the release. Queued prompts fix a long-standing annoyance: messages submitted while Cline is already working now queue, render while the current turn streams, and can be cancelled before they run, instead of being dropped or racing the active turn. Edit-and-regenerate lets you edit a previous user message and rerun from there, with Escape cancelling the edit locally and clearer Reset Chat and Reset Code labels.
Provider and model configuration is reworked around providers.json, the model catalog, and SDK session config, and the release wires in a broad set of providers and models: ClinePass models, Fireworks GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6 Fast, Kimi K2.7 Code, Qwen 3.7 Plus, MiniMax M3, SAP AI Core, LiteLLM model fetching, Codex OAuth credentials, and OpenAI-compatible model settings. The shared generic settings components and reasoning selectors replace many provider-specific views.
Safety defaults tighten. Command auto-approval is now disabled by default for new and reset configurations, and the auto-approval UI is streamlined. The release also fixes SDK tool-result and provider-message budgeting by truncating large tool outputs by default, capping assistant text, limiting bash, file-read, and search output ingestion, bounding media budgets, and batching outdated-read rewrites to preserve provider prefix caches. Terminal reliability gets a long fix list, including standalone Windows output capture, hardened PowerShell handling, heredoc coalescing, and removal of duplicated command echoes.
What to watch
Two caveats are worth flagging before upgrading. Subagents are temporarily disabled in the VS Code extension while the SDK-backed experience stabilizes, so teams relying on multi-agent orchestration through Cline's subagent feature will need to wait for it to return. The legacy Explain Changes feature is removed as part of the SDK migration cleanup. Everything else is additive. The full changelog between v3.89.2 and v4.0.0 is on the compare view, and the CLI line continues independently on the v3.0.x branch. Cline has roughly 64,000 GitHub stars and sits in a category that is consolidating fast; 4.0 is the version where it stops being an extension and starts being a platform.
