Head to head
Aider vs Cline
Comparing 4 documented Aider incidents against 5 for Cline.
Verdict
Aider has the lower average failure severity (4.5/10 vs 5.5/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Aider | Cline |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 4 | 5 |
| Average severity | 4.5 | 5.5 |
| Critical | 0 | 1 |
| High | 0 | 0 |
| Verified | 1 | 5 |
Severity at a glance
Failure modes
The incidents behind these numbers
Aider
4.8Aider exits with code 0 after a fatal API connection failure, masking hard failures as successful headless runs4.6Aider silently discards a model's correct diff response as "no tracked changes" when it guesses the wrong edit format4.4Aider's headless `--message` mode silently swallows slash commands (`/model`, `/ask`, `/architect`) and exits 0 having done nothing4.2Aider's unified-diff coder silently drops the partial-application warning when one hunk succeeds and another fails
Cline
10.0Clinejection: an AI issue-triage workflow enabled arbitrary code execution on the CI runner5.8Cline's tool-call JSON repair silently executed truncated write_file and terminal arguments as valid4.5Cline's Plan mode edits files without switching to Act or asking permission3.8Cline's execute_command reported a failing Ruff lint check as passing over Remote-SSH3.2Cline keeps performing unrelated actions and repeats them after being explicitly told to stop