Head to head

Claude Code vs Cline

Comparing 29 documented Claude Code incidents against 5 for Cline.
Full Claude Codereport →Full Clinereport →

Verdict

Cline has the lower average failure severity (5.5/10 vs 7.3/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.

Reliability metrics for Claude Code and Cline
MetricClaude CodeCline
Documented incidents295
Average severity7.35.5
Critical91
High110
Verified285

Severity at a glance

Claude Code
7.3high
Cline
5.5medium

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

10.0Claude Code wiped DataTalks.Club's production infrastructure — 2.5 years of course data — during an AWS migration10.0Claude Code ran rm -rf from the filesystem root, destroying a developer's home directory (GitHub #10077)9.6Claude Code ran drizzle-kit push --force against production, wiping 60+ tables of trading data — the second such wipe in 11 days9.5Claude Code moved files into a log/ subfolder, then rm -rf'd the parent directory containing it — 1,500 files gone (GitHub #49129)9.5Claude Code's parallel-subagent worktree cleanup deleted the main .git directory and entire working tree — irrecoverable repo loss (GitHub #48927)

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