AI People Wiki

Builders & open source

Saoud Rizwan

Founder, Cline

Saoud Rizwan is the founder of Cline, an open-source coding agent that runs in code editors such as VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, in the terminal and as an embeddable SDK. Rizwan built the first version in July 2024 as a demo for an Anthropic hackathon and writes many of the Cline blog's engineering and announcement posts.1234

At a glance

Current role
Founder
Company
Cline
Sector
Company
Work listed
2
Sources cited
8
Profile reviewed

Products and projects

Rizwan's account of Cline's origins describes a week in July 2024 spent building a demo for an Anthropic hackathon that gave a model file access, terminal commands and the ability to navigate a codebase. The demo did not win, but the project grew into Cline, and Rizwan writes that many early open-source contributors later joined the team.3

Cline today is offered as an IDE extension, a CLI, a desktop app and an SDK built on one open agent runtime. In September 2026 Rizwan described migrating the VS Code extension from its original monolithic core to the shared Cline SDK, including a staged A/B rollout built because the marketplace offered no gradual release mechanism.25

Writing

Rizwan's posts on the Cline blog cover agent design and evaluation. An August 2025 post introduced the Focus Chain, in which the agent drafts a numbered plan and keeps it in context to stay on task, and a November 2025 post introduced cline-bench, built from real open-source engineering work rather than puzzle-style tasks.674

Work and contributions

  • Cline Open-source code

    Created Cline, which began as a hackathon demo giving an AI model the same tools a developer uses, such as file access and terminal commands. The Apache-2.0 project now spans an IDE extension, a CLI, a desktop app and the Cline SDK.382

  • cline-bench Published research

    Announced cline-bench in November 2025, an initiative to build research-grade benchmarks and reinforcement learning environments from real open-source development tasks.7

Timeline

  1. Built the first version of Cline as a demo for an Anthropic hackathon.3
  2. Introduced the Focus Chain for keeping Cline's agent anchored to long tasks.6
  3. Announced cline-bench, an open benchmark initiative for agentic coding.7
  4. Wrote a history of Cline's growth from a hackathon project into an open-source team.3
  5. Described moving the Cline VS Code extension onto the shared Cline SDK harness.5

Where they work

  • Cline 1 person in the wiki

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References

8 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. saoudrizwan (Saoud Rizwan) on GitHubGitHub · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. Cline — AI coding, open source and open choiceCline Bot Inc. · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. Cline blog — the story of how Cline got here and its Open Source Grant programCline Bot Inc. · Announcement · published Jan 30, 2026 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. Cline blog archiveCline Bot Inc. · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. Cline blog — migrating users to Cline's harness upgradeCline Bot Inc. · Announcement · published Sep 2, 2026 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. Focus: attention isn't enoughCline Bot Inc. · Announcement · published Aug 15, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  7. Introducing cline-bench: A Real-World, Open Source Benchmark for Agentic CodingCline Bot Inc. · Announcement · published Nov 20, 2025 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  8. cline/cline on GitHub (Apache-2.0)Cline (GitHub repository) · Repository · accessed Oct 21, 2026