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The combination of the Cline plugin and DeepSeek has been frequently mentioned recently. Just in time, Cline has updated to a new version. I will briefly introduce its usage and share my experience with it.
In simple terms, Cline is an open-source VSCode plugin, whose English name is AI assistant that can use your CLI and Editor, abbreviated as Cline. Its main function is to realize the Agent functionality of Cursor to read and write code, then generate code and execute commands.
Since the Cline team has open-sourced their code, there are some new projects based on Cline, such as Roo Cline, which many people are using.
In short, Cline supports APIs compatible with OpenAI formats, can execute commands, manipulate files, and supports code editing, among other features. After the updated version 3.1, it supports checkpoint functionality, allowing for code and workspace rollback operations.
In VSCode, find the plugin store, search for Cline, and you will see this plugin. Roo Cline is a branch version of Cline, and the usage of both is basically similar, so you can install both to try them out.
After installation, configure the API Key to start using it. We are using the DeepSeek API here, and you can see how to apply for the API in this article:Cursor Practical Skills: Custom Model Usage, such as Kimi, DeepSeek
Select DeepSeek as the API Provider, fill in the API Key, and click start to proceed.
We will use the prompt words from the previous match-3 game to test the effectiveness of this plugin. For this project, the entire execution process called the API 12 times before obtaining the final code.
At the beginning of the conversation, it will display the tokens consumed and the money spent. The content in the upper right corner includes new conversation, MCP server, conversation history, open in sidebar, and settings buttons.
At the end of the last call, a task completion mark will be displayed, summarizing the functions completed in the current task, allowing us to conveniently compare the code to check if there are any issues.
Additionally, when hovering over the conversation, two buttons will appear on the right side, namely compare and rollback. Comparing will show what code has been modified before and after this API request, while rollback will eliminate the changes from this request, reverting to the previous state.
The Cline plugin achieves functionality similar to Cursor’s Agent and can automatically generate code and create code files. However, Cursor’s custom models cannot use Composer and Agent functionalities, making Cline a viable alternative in this regard.
However, Cline also has many drawbacks, the most typical being the high token consumption. This is why DeepSeek’s tokens are relatively inexpensive. I spent 170,000 tokens just executing this simple command. If using other large models, this would incur a huge cost.
Additionally, even very simple problems in Cline require complex prompts, which consumes tokens, which is clearly unreasonable. Fortunately, Cline has a maximum request round limit, which defaults to 20 times and can be adjusted according to your needs.
Furthermore, the DeepSeek model currently does not support inputting and understanding images in Cline. To achieve similar functionality, one would need to use Claude; however, if you’re using Claude, you might as well use Cursor directly.
Overall, using DeepSeek’s model can be considered a good alternative choice. If you want to use other models like Claude Sonnet or Haiku, you will need to weigh your options, as the final costs may not be significantly cheaper than Cursor.
Cline project address:https://github.com/cline/cline
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