Spend your tokens even faster with Cline 3.0

Cline for VS Code is my current favorite AI-powered coding tool, and it just got a bit better.

It can now connect to MCP (model context protocol) servers to augment its capabilities. You can auto-approve specific requests (very useful for reading files).

The biggest change that speeds things up is diff editing for large files.

Previously, when the file grew beyond 300 lines of code, it had to type out the whole file if the tool had to fix a single line of code.

It took a while.

Now though, it’s using search & replace, and the result is much faster file editing.

It also avoids the // rest of the code here errors that were frequent when it ran out of context memory.

It’s not perfect, and it often falls back to line-by-line file editing, but it’s a significant step up.

Another cool thing, now you can add .clinerules file in the root of your project and describe any conventions, link documentation and provide context about the architecture.

When you combine that with the general custom prompt it means you can tailor the AI’s behavior to your project.

No more having to remind it to go again, but using pnpm, not npm, then waiting for a long time while it edits the deployment script line by line.

Yours,

Taj