Head to head
Cline vs Devin
Comparing 8 documented Cline incidents against 10 for Devin.
Verdict
Devin has the lower average failure severity (3.9/10 vs 5.7/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Cline | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 8 | 10 |
| Average severity | 5.7 | 3.9 |
| Critical | 1 | 1 |
| High | 1 | 0 |
| Verified | 8 | 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 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
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