Cline vs Aider vs Continue 2026: Best Open-Source AI Coder
Compare Cline vs Aider vs Continue in 2026: real costs, model support, and workflow trade-offs of the top open-source BYOK AI coding tools. Which one wins?
Chapter 1: The 2026 Open-Source AI Coding Landscape: Why BYOK Won Three years ago, the pitch was simple: pay $10 or $20 a month, get an AI that writes your code, and never think about it again. That pitch worked. GitHub Copilot hit a million paying subscribers, Cursor built a $400M ARR business on a forked VS Code, and every IDE vendor scrambled to bolt a chat panel onto their sidebar. The subscription model looked unbeatable because it hid all the ugly parts — model selection, token accounting, rate limits, provider outages — behind a flat fee. Then the ugly...