Head to head
Cline vs Devin
Comparing 5 documented Cline incidents against 10 for Devin.
Verdict
Devin has the lower average failure severity (3.9/10 vs 5.5/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Cline | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 5 | 10 |
| Average severity | 5.5 | 3.9 |
| Critical | 1 | 1 |
| High | 0 | 0 |
| Verified | 5 | 10 |
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 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
Devin
10.0Devin replaced entire medical website with unrelated renal care site5.8Devin CI workflow caused 836-comment spam storm on single PR5.0Devin built 13,600-line app with build failure instead of lean campaign dashboard3.4Devin PR broke ledger list API and created buckets on deleted resources3.4Devin attempted to build entire Figma clone from scratch — 3 rejected attempts