How Cline Embraces an Open-Weights Model Ecosystem for AI Agents

Model capability alone doesn't make a reliable coding agent. The agent harness is what turns raw model performance into dependable, autonomous behavior. That's especially true with open-weight models, which are getting more capable fast while giving developers more room to customize, optimize cost, and keep control. In this session, we'll share how Cline, a leading open-source coding agent, optimized its harness across open-weight models, the tradeoffs we weighed along the way, and what we learned about getting the best performance from them.