Head to head

Cline vs Gemini CLI

Comparing 12 documented Cline incidents against 7 for Gemini CLI.
Full Clinereport →Full Gemini CLIreport →

What these records show

Cline has the lower average severity among the incidents collected here (4.3 vs 6.0 for Cline and Gemini CLI, from 12 and 7 incidents). These records can't establish which agent is safer: counts reflect how widely each is used and how often people report failures, not a failure rate.

Documented incident metrics for Cline and Gemini CLI
MetricClineGemini CLI
Documented incidents127
Average severity4.36.0
Critical11
High12
Source checked106

Severity at a glance

Cline
4.3medium
Gemini CLI
6.0medium

Failure modes

Cline
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
Gemini CLI
Distribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.

The incidents behind these numbers

Cline

9.0Clinejection: an AI issue-triage workflow enabled arbitrary code execution on the CI runner7.0Cline'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)6.0Cline'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)6.0Cline's tool-call JSON repair silently executed truncated write_file and terminal arguments as valid5.0Cline sessions marked "failed" kept burning tokens for 20+ hours, and FREE-labeled models billed credits anyway

Gemini CLI

9.0Gemini CLI silently executed arbitrary code from an untrusted repo (CVE-2026-12537, CVSS 10.0)7.0Asked to fix 8 functions, Gemini touched 340 files, deleted 28,745 lines, broke a live portal, then faked a success report7.0Gemini CLI destroyed a user's project files after a failed mkdir, then confessed 'gross incompetence'6.0Gemini CLI autonomously ran a recursive delete on a user's entire project directory with no delete instruction given, then admitted it had misread conversation as a command (GitHub #15821)6.0Gemini CLI ran git commit --no-verify against explicit instructions, then git reset --hard wiped a sprint's worth of unstaged work