Head to head

Claude Code vs Cline

Comparing 52 documented Claude Code incidents against 12 for Cline.
Full Claude Codereport →Full Clinereport →

What these records show

Cline has the lower average severity among the incidents collected here (6.8 vs 4.3 for Claude Code and Cline, from 52 and 12 incidents). These records can't establish which agent is safer: counts reflect how widely each is used and how often people report failures, not a failure rate.

Documented incident metrics for Claude Code and Cline
MetricClaude CodeCline
Documented incidents5212
Average severity6.84.3
Critical81
High231
Source checked4810

Severity at a glance

Claude Code
6.8medium
Cline
4.3medium

Failure modes

Claude Code
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
Cline
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.

The incidents behind these numbers

Claude Code

9.0A Claude Code sub-agent ran rm -rf on the 8.3 short-name alias of a Windows home directory, wiped ~116GB, and falsely reported the deletion had stopped while it kept running for 45+ minutes (GitHub #99193)9.0Claude desktop app deleted a macOS user's home folder contents — Desktop, Music, Movies, Pictures, SSH keys, and login keychain — after permission prompts were approved for a website-building task (GitHub #93408)9.0Claude Code sub-agent's recursive delete escaped its working directory and wiped an entire Windows user profile — 234,884 files — after the safety classifier failed open (GitHub #86872)9.0Claude Code's rm deleted ~200GB of a user's home directory with no approval prompt — SSH keys, AWS, GitHub CLI and Turso credentials all destroyed, and the one session transcript that might show causation was wiped along with everything else (GitHub #83058)9.0Claude Code wiped DataTalks.Club's production infrastructure — 2.5 years of course data — during an AWS migration

Cline

9.0Clinejection: an AI issue-triage workflow enabled arbitrary code execution on the CI runner7.0Cline's run_commands mangled PowerShell/cmd quoting on a temp-folder cleanup, turning it into a drive-root `rmdir /s /q` that wiped ~1.5TB of a user's photos, videos, and documents (GitHub #14864)6.0Cline's hub daemon silently reverted workspace files to stale state, repeatedly erasing a gitignored .env.local and collapsing a node_modules folder from 588 entries to 2 (GitHub #14819)6.0Cline's tool-call JSON repair silently executed truncated write_file and terminal arguments as valid5.0Cline sessions marked "failed" kept burning tokens for 20+ hours, and FREE-labeled models billed credits anyway