03 Nov 2025 — 3 min read

A year ago, Cline was a hackathon project that didn’t win (or even place in the top 3). Today, it’s GitHub’s fastest-growing open source AI project. Cline has been recognized in GitHub’s Octoverse 2025 as the fastest growing AI-focused open source project and the platform’s second fastest growing project overall, getting a 4,704% year-over-year contributor growth. This recognition belongs to every developer who decided to try something new, put their trust in Cline, and build alongside us.

Source: GitHub Octoverse Report 2025

This growth comes from real work. Developers contributed to Cline with MCP servers, connecting to databases, cloud platforms, and development tools. Optimizing the system prompt, teaching the agent to reason through complex refactoring and handle edge cases more gracefully. They debugged diff editing failures, improved checkpoint reliability, and fixed issues across model providers. The community created .clinerules workflows, shared model configurations, and wrote guides that turned newcomers into contributors in hours instead of weeks.

Today, Cline has over 3.8 million installations and runs in VS Code, JetBrains, and the CLI. This isn’t growth through hype. It’s developers finding a tool that works the way they do.

AI as an Onramp, Not a Gatekeeper

AI is transforming how people learn and contribute to open source. With Cline, developers can explore, understand, and make meaningful contributions from day one.

Damian Arnsdorff, a forklift operator from Tennessee switching careers to tech, arrived at his first hackathon with every fear a junior developer can have. He was one of the last to find a team, placed with senior engineers who had years of experience, and had never even used a coding agent before. But with Cline, something shifted. Within 30-40 minutes, he watched it generate thousands of lines of code that would have taken him months to write manually, all while explaining the decisions it made along the way.

“It’s like having a senior dev you can ask on call 24/7 that isn’t gonna scoff at you,” he says.

His team won the hackathon with an AI-powered DMCA takedown service, but the real victory was deeper. Cline gave Damian the confidence to contribute meaningfully alongside experienced engineers, proving that the gap between learning and building doesn’t have to be as wide as it feels. For developers like Damian – studying online while working 12-hour shifts– AI isn’t replacing the learning process. It’s making it possible to learn by building real projects, right now.

Take Tomas, an open-source contributor who used Cline to navigate the repo, find his bearings, and make his first contribution even without deep familiarity with the codebase. Cline helped him bridge the gap between curiosity and contribution. That is the power of agency and transparency. The tools do not replace developers; they amplify their creativity and ability to learn. Today, Tomas is a valued part of the Cline team, building the very agentic experience that got him started.

Cline’s growth is proof that when developers have agency, transparency, and community, they can build something far greater than any single tool.

Find What Excites You and Find Your People

At Cline, we believe the best open source contributions start with curiosity. We encourage every new contributor to follow what interests them. Whether that means improving core prompts, designing a friendlier UX, or writing documentation that helps others, your ideas and contributions are what move Cline forward.

If you are looking to grow your skills, share ideas, or collaborate with people who share your passion, Cline is ready for you. Whether your contribution is a bug fix, a new feature, improved docs, or simply helping someone new, your work makes Cline better for everyone.

Join us on Discord or Reddit to connect with other developers. Check out the docs to get started. If you’re ready to contribute, visit our GitHub repository and find what excites you.