Kilo Code is an open-source VS Code and JetBrains extension plus CLI harness that effectively merged ideas from Cline and Roo Code into one platform, built by people who had worked on both. It supports multi-step planning, error recovery, context-aware suggestions, test generation, and dependency fixes, aiming to handle the lower-level grunt work of a coding task automatically.
Its Orchestrator mode chains together specialized agent modes, like architect, code, and debug, to coordinate more complex workflows than a single generic agent usually handles well, and a Memory Bank feature keeps project-level context persistent across sessions rather than starting from zero each time. It connects to over 500 models with no markup on usage, meaning cost is whatever the underlying provider charges, plus an MCP marketplace for extending what the agent can do and support for running several subagents in parallel.
Being open source and free, it's positioned as a more fully-featured alternative to picking between Cline and Roo Code separately, for developers who want the orchestration layer both of those projects were missing on their own.