What Is Cline Code Review?

Cline code review is the review of code written with Cline, the open-source AI coding agent that runs in VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, a desktop app and the terminal. The term covers Cline’s own review tools, review jobs teams build with Cline in CI and independent review on the pull request (PR).

For PR reviewers that work across both major Git platforms, see agentic AI code reviewers for GitHub and GitLab.

Cline lets teams pick their model, including their own API keys or local models. Model choice means review quality depends on the model and on how the team configures the checks.

Either way, agent-written code still has to meet the team’s standards before it merges.

What Changed in Cline Code Review in 2026

At the start of 2026, Cline was a coding agent inside the IDE, and review happened ad hoc in chat. During the year, Cline made review scriptable instead of launching a review product.

Cline moved from the IDE sidebar into pipelines, and its own team named review as the constraint:

• Review became scriptable: Cline CLI 2.0 added a headless mode that streams output to stdout, so a pipeline can pipe a diff into Cline and ask it to review the changes (February 13, 2026, Cline’s blog).
• One runtime now powers Cline everywhere: the open-source Cline SDK runs Cline in VS Code, JetBrains and the CLI (May 13, 2026, Cline’s blog).
• Cline itself named review as its bottleneck: a guide to building a code review agent with the SDK said the bottleneck had "shifted from writing code to reviewing it at scale" (August 26, 2026, Cline’s blog).

More agents now run at once, so more diffs arrive together. Cline launched Kanban, a task board that runs agents in parallel worktrees and shows each task’s diff against the base branch (March 26, 2026, Cline’s blog).

Cline Desktop followed as an early open-source app for open-weight models with parallel sessions and scheduled tasks (September 14, 2026, Cline’s blog).

With parallel agents producing diffs at once, a team using Cline needs review that applies its own standards to every one of them. Teams comparing agents can also read Windsurf code review and Claude Code plugins.

How Code Review Works in Cline

Plan Mode

In Plan mode, Cline can read the codebase, search and discuss an approach, but can’t change files or run commands. Cline’s docs list reviewing code as one use of Plan mode (last checked October 2026, Cline’s docs). Plan mode review is a form of in-agent code review.

Checkpoints

Cline saves a checkpoint in a shadow Git repository after each file edit or command. Developers can compare any checkpoint as a diff or restore it, without touching the project’s own Git history (last checked October 2026, Cline’s docs).

Rules

Workspace rules in .clinerules/ or .cline/rules/ give Cline standing instructions. Cline also reads .cursorrules, .windsurfrules and AGENTS.md (last checked October 2026, Cline’s docs). Rules guide what Cline writes but don’t check the finished PR. See AGENTS.md files.

PR Review With Cline CLI in GitHub Actions

Cline’s docs include a sample GitHub Actions workflow. One job, with a read-only token, runs Cline CLI to read the PR and write a review. A second job posts it as a comment (last checked October 2026, Cline’s docs). The team supplies the model API key and keeps the workflow and prompt up to date.

Limits of Reviewing Cline Code With Cline

• Same agent, same assumptions. When Cline reviews code Cline wrote, often with the same model, it can repeat the same blind spots.
• A job to look after. A CI review job is code the team writes, pays for and keeps up to date.
• No memory of past reviews. A prompt-based review starts fresh each time, with no record of what the team fixed or dismissed before.
• Workspace context. A local review sees only the open workspace, without other related repositories. See multi-repo code review.

How to Review Code Written With Cline

1. Plan the change in Plan mode before Cline writes code.
2. Keep team conventions in AGENTS.md so Cline and other tools read the same file.
3. Compare checkpoints before committing, and restore any that went wrong.
4. Open small PRs so reviews stay readable.
5. Run an independent review on every PR, with context from the whole codebase.

Qodo’s Take: An Open Agent Still Needs an Independent Reviewer

Cline gives teams control over the agent and the model, and a team can build a capable review job with it. What a self-built job rarely has is independence: a separate reviewer with its own context and a memory of how the team reviews.

The independent reviewer belongs on the pull request, where every change lands whatever wrote it.

Teams that standardize on one approved model provider usually want review to use it too, and wonder whether review quality depends on the model that wrote the code. Keeping the agent, its model and the reviewer separate keeps the review independent of both.

Qodo reviews code in the Git provider, separate from the agent that wrote it. Qodo has no Cline plugin, and doesn’t need one for PR review.

Qodo is the best AI code review platform to review Cline-generated code because it reviews every pull request against the team’s rules, once Rule enforcement is on, whichever agent or model wrote the code, and can send its own model calls to a reachable OpenAI-compatible endpoint the team already approves.

Qodo Reviews Every PR in the Git Provider

Qodo’s review agents flag bugs, rule violations, requirement gaps and cross-repository conflicts on each pull request, using the full codebase, PR history, linked tickets and the team’s standards (last checked October 2026, Qodo’s docs). Qodo works on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and, on Enterprise plans, Gerrit (Qodo’s docs).

Qodo Learns What the Team Fixes

Qodo indexes PR history on GitHub and GitLab, in Beta. If the team usually fixed a type of finding, Qodo treats new ones as likely relevant; if the team often dismissed it, Qodo says so (last checked October 2026, Qodo’s docs).

Rule Miner, also in Beta, turns repeated reviewer feedback into rules (Qodo’s docs).

Qodo Turns AGENTS.md Into Review Rules

Qodo can import rules from AGENTS.md and other supported files on push, scoped to the folder where each file sits (last checked October 2026, Qodo’s docs). Qodo doesn’t read .clinerules, so shared conventions belong in AGENTS.md. See custom rules for code review.

Qodo Works With the Models a Team Approves

Cline users often pick their own models. Qodo’s review models are configured separately, and can point to a reachable OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so regulated teams can keep review on models they’ve approved (Qodo’s docs).

Qodo Holds One Standard Whatever Model Wrote the Code

Agents don’t reliably follow team standards: 34.6% of 500 US developers surveyed said AI coding agents always follow their organization’s standards (August 2026, Qodo’s State of AI Code Quality report). Once Rule enforcement is on, Qodo applies the same rules on every PR, whichever model Cline used. See AI-generated code validation.

Qodo Example: The Finding the Team Always Fixes

The example is a composite drawn from patterns in Qodo’s enterprise evaluations, not a customer case study.

A platform lead has standardized on one approved model provider and runs Cline with it.

A team runs Cline with a local model and a Cline review job in GitHub Actions. A PR adds a database query inside a loop, and the job doesn’t flag it. Qodo does, and marks it as likely relevant because the team fixed the same pattern in past PRs.

Ways to Review Code Written With Cline

The table compares common review options for Cline users.

Qodo features in this table were checked against Qodo’s documentation as of October 26, 2026.