Further testing of Cline
TLDR; Cline wasn’t great at optimising my app’s CSS and got stuck launching browser to review changes.
I continued to test operation of cline using the gemini model, this time to try and optimise the LNRS Toolkit which I built. This is an app built on opendatasoft’s platform using ODS’s widgets and AngularJS. I wanted to see if cline could help to optimise the operation and appearance of the app.
I gave the model my CSS and HTML files and asked it to review the code. It made several changes, as I just auto - approved the changes and modified the files. I copied the files into the ODS backoffice and then published the app. Unfortunately many of the changes were wrong, and the elements appeared in the wrong places.
Cline worked well with reviewing a text - only version of the app when I just asked it to make the app responsive and fill the screen on PC viewport.
I asked cline to review the web page but it got stuck on launching the browser. After several loops of trying to resolve, it gave up. And I had burned through all my Gemini 2.5 Flash tokens so have to switch to Gemini 2.0. Not sure if Claude would have been better - but expensive in any case. This may be an OS specific issue as using Cline on Windows it opened the browser (edge) no problem.
However, It is quite amazing to see this tool in action and how potentially powerful it is. You can see it writing code, thinking and reasoning, and it shows your API token usage and cost in real time. There seems no doubt that it will continue to improve, so definitely worth continuing to learn. I like that it is integrated into VS Code.