Saoud Rizwan, co-creator of Cline, discusses how different agent modalities serve distinct software engineering workflows rather than replacing one another.
“I think background agents are good for certain kinds of work and parallel Kanban. Multi agents might be good for when you want to experiment and iterate on, you know, five different versions of, you know, how a landing page might look and then something like a back and forth with a single agent like Klein, Works really well for when you want to, you know, pull context and put together a really complicated plan for a really complex task. And I think all these different tools will ultimately end up complementing each other and people will kind of develop a taste and an understanding for what works best for what kind of work.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Saoud (Saud) Rizwan
AssertionContradicted
Rizwan: Cline invented the 'plan and act' developer interaction paradigm
“I'm going to take
The cred for coming up with plan act first.
And then we were, Klein was the first to sort of come up with this concept of having two modes for the developer to engage with.”
Rizwan: Early Copilot and Cursor were built for one-shot prompting
“That's really different from how the, you know, the other things at the time were things like copilot and cursor and Adr. They didn't do this for like step by step reasoning and accomplishing tasks. They were more suited for the Q and A and one shot prompting …”
Rizwan: Maintaining a VS Code fork is notoriously difficult and resource-intensive
“No, I actually like pity anybody that has to fork VS Code because Microsoft makes it like notoriously difficult to maintain these forks. So a lot of resources and efforts go into just maintaining, keeping your fork up to date with all the updates that VS Code …”
Rizwan: Developers will shift from tab autocomplete to natural language agents
“As the models get better, people are going to find themselves using natural language, working with an agent more and more and less being in the weeds and editing code and tab autocomplete.”
Rizwan: AI coding tools should not monetize through inference markups
“Our thesis is inference is not the business. We, yeah, we want to give the end user total transparency into price, into, which I think is like incredibly important to, you know, even get comfortable with the idea of spending as much money as you do. I think th…”
This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.