Saoud Rizwan
Founder of Cline, the open-source AI coding agent for editors, the terminal and an SDK
Saoud Rizwan is the founder of Cline, an open-source coding agent that runs in code editors such as VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, in the terminal and as an embeddable SDK. Rizwan built the first version in July 2024 as a demo for an Anthropic hackathon and writes many of the Cline blog's engineering and announcement posts.1254
Products and projects
Rizwan's account of Cline's origins describes a week in July 2024 spent building a demo for an Anthropic hackathon that gave a model file access, terminal commands and the ability to navigate a codebase. The demo did not win, but the project grew into Cline, and Rizwan writes that many early open-source contributors later joined the team.5
Cline today is offered as an IDE extension, a CLI, a desktop app and an SDK built on one open agent runtime. In September 2026 Rizwan described migrating the VS Code extension from its original monolithic core to the shared Cline SDK, including a staged A/B rollout built because the marketplace offered no gradual release mechanism.28
Writing
Rizwan's posts on the Cline blog cover agent design and evaluation. An August 2025 post introduced the Focus Chain, in which the agent drafts a numbered plan and keeps it in context to stay on task, and a November 2025 post introduced cline-bench, built from real open-source engineering work rather than puzzle-style tasks.764
Work
ClineOpen-source code
Created Cline, which began as a hackathon demo giving an AI model the same tools a developer uses, such as file access and terminal commands. The Apache-2.0 project now spans an IDE extension, a CLI, a desktop app and the Cline SDK.532
cline-bench (external site: cline.bot)Published research
Announced cline-bench in November 2025, an initiative to build research-grade benchmarks and reinforcement learning environments from real open-source development tasks.6
Career timeline
Jul 2024
Built the first version of Cline as a demo for an Anthropic hackathon.5
Aug 15, 2025
Introduced the Focus Chain for keeping Cline's agent anchored to long tasks.7
Nov 20, 2025
Announced cline-bench, an open benchmark initiative for agentic coding.6
Jan 30, 2026
Wrote a history of Cline's growth from a hackathon project into an open-source team.5
Sep 2, 2026
Described moving the Cline VS Code extension onto the shared Cline SDK harness.8
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