Head to head
Claude Code vs Cline
Comparing 45 documented Claude Code incidents against 8 for Cline.
Verdict
Cline has the lower average failure severity (5.7/10 vs 7.1/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Claude Code | Cline |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 45 | 8 |
| Average severity | 7.1 | 5.7 |
| Critical | 10 | 1 |
| High | 18 | 1 |
| Verified | 43 | 8 |
Severity at a glance
Claude Code
7.1
high
Cline
5.7
medium
Failure modes
Claude CodeDistribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
ClineDistribution 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 an unprompted rm -rf on a cygpath substitution that resolved to the Windows C: drive root, destroying ~600GB including the user's profile, git repos, and its own session transcripts (GitHub #95426)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)
Cline
10.0Clinejection: an AI issue-triage workflow enabled arbitrary code execution on the CI runner7.8Cline'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)5.8Cline'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)5.8Cline's tool-call JSON repair silently executed truncated write_file and terminal arguments as valid4.8Cline sessions marked "failed" kept burning tokens for 20+ hours, and FREE-labeled models billed credits anyway