Kilo Code formed by forking two existing open-source VS Code coding agents, Cline and Roo Code, itself an earlier fork of Cline, and merging their features into one unified extension rather than starting its own agent architecture from scratch. That lineage means it inherited a real, tested codebase and community rather than building agent behavior from zero.
That inherited position became more significant in April 2026, when Roo Code's maintainer announced the project was shutting down, with its GitHub repository archived the following month. Kilo Code has since become the officially recommended migration path for displaced Roo Code users, carrying over shared functionality, custom modes, project rules, MCP support, and diff-based editing, without requiring a new subscription product.
Kilo Code is free and open source, supporting more than five hundred underlying models with pricing described as zero markup over provider costs. For a developer who used Cline or, especially, the now-shut-down Roo Code, Kilo Code is currently positioned as the most direct continuation of that specific lineage rather than a completely separate tool to learn from scratch.
