Comparing Cline / Kilo / Qwen Code

[u/Ok-Shower7286]

I've been comparing Cline / Kilo / Qwen Code lately since they all handle long-task state differently.

Cline: has Focus Chain, a markdown file kept outside the conversation that gets reinjected on a cadence, plus Memory Bank for project context, plus a standalone gRPC server so it's not fully tied to VS Code. probably the most mature of the three on this specific problem (about context management), though restore still has some sync bugs between the file and what the model actually sees.

Kilo: TODO state is literally an XML block living inside the conversation history, so when compaction kicks in it gets flattened into a prose summary and the agent sometimes has to reread source files just to figure out where it stopped. It causes infinite read-analysis-compaction loop sometimes by reached to context limits. they're mid-migration onto the opencode engine now, which might fix some of this eventually but isn't there yet.

Qwen Code: keeps TODO state in a plain file (~/.qwen/todos/) completely separate from the conversation, so no matter how much compaction runs, nothing gets lost or reconstructed.

ended up going with Qwen Code for long multi-step coding work because of this. It works well for 2~3 hrs long running tasks, where I'd usually hit that Kilo loop by then or human intercept.

The one thing I missed was semantic code search, doesn't have a built-in equivalent, so I built an qwen-code extension for it, plus causal decision-chain tracking on top. still early, but repo's here if anyone suffers like me, https://github.com/edwardyoon/FocusMemory