Roo Code

Roo Code (formerly Roo Cline) was a community fork of the Cline VS Code extension that grew into its own product line before being shut down by Roo Code, Inc. on May 15, 2026. Its distinctive idea was "modes": you could define specialized agents such as Architect, Code, Ask, and Debug, each with its own system prompt, tool permissions, and preferred model. In practice you might route planning work to a reasoning model like Claude Opus or DeepSeek-R1 and delegate mechanical edits to a cheaper Haiku, Gemini Flash, or a self-hosted Qwen — all from the same task. Roo Code kept the Cline lineage of BYOK across ~20 providers, transparent cost tracking, and per-command approval gates.

Roo Code was an early adopter of MCP and had one of the more aggressive MCP integrations available: an in-editor MCP marketplace, custom MCP server templates, and per-mode tool allow-lists so, for example, Debug mode could call Chrome DevTools MCP while Ask mode could not. It also shipped a "Boomerang Task" feature where sub-agents returned structured results to a parent agent, plus experimental support for computer-use tools.

With the extension shut down, the codebase remains available under Apache 2.0, and the community has forked it as ZooCode. Users looking for a supported alternative should evaluate ZooCode (closest continuation with the modes/MCP surface), Cline (the original project the fork came from), Roomote (the same team's follow-on cloud coding agent), or Kilo Code — another Cline fork with similar goals. Billing questions can still be sent to billing@roocode.com.