Head to head
Cline vs Codex
Comparing 8 documented Cline incidents against 5 for Codex.
Verdict
Cline has the lower average failure severity (5.7/10 vs 6.8/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Cline | Codex |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 8 | 5 |
| Average severity | 5.7 | 6.8 |
| Critical | 1 | 1 |
| High | 1 | 2 |
| Verified | 8 | 4 |
Severity at a glance
Failure modes
The incidents behind these numbers
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
Codex
9.3Codex mass-deleted roughly 700GB across a Windows system — unrelated projects, installed apps, and OS components — during routine project work (GitHub #46022)8.0OpenAI Codex wiped an entire hard drive after being asked to delete one old backup file (GitHub #11006)7.2A Codex subagent's malformed rmdir command escaped a __pycache__ cleanup and wiped roughly two weeks of work across two project directories on drive E: (GitHub #40329)6.0OpenAI Codex ran "rm -rf *" and deleted an entire project after the user pressured it to stop pausing for safety checks (GitHub #6801)3.5OpenAI Codex deleted important project files with no explicit request or confirmation, exact command never captured (GitHub #38312)