Roo Code, an open source AI coding tool built for VS Code, has announced that it’s shutting down its VS Code extension, Cloud, and Router services on May 15, as the team shifts away from IDE-based development toward autonomous agents that run tasks end-to-end outside the editor.
In tandem, the company also introduced Roomote, a cloud-based coding agent that runs tasks end-to-end across tools such as Slack, GitHub, and Linear, producing ready-to-review outputs for developers to inspect and refine.
Roomote in action
Matt Rubens, Roo Code CEO and co-founder, writes in an X post this week that his own internal team was already moving away from using Roo Code inside the IDE, instead running it in remote cloud environments where agents could take on multiple tasks in parallel without direct oversight. These agents would open fixes, run the application, and verify their own output before handing off completed work for review.
At that point, much of the development work was happening outside the IDE, with engineers stepping in after the fact. And that effectively meant entire chunks of routine engineering work were being completed without direct involvement from developers.
“If the agent can create a good PR [pull request] from a single prompt, the interaction model changes completely – you let go of the IDE and focus on driving things end-to-end,” Rubens said. “The agent doesn’t just help engineers – it wipes entire types of work off their plate and delivers something nobody has to clean up.”
A fork in the road
Roo Code, for the uninitiated, emerged in late 2024 as a fork of Cline, an earlier open source AI coding agent. While many forks appeared off the back of Cline, Roo Code set itself apart in several ways, including features that gave agents more autonomy to act on a developer’s behalf.
That approach helped it gain traction quickly, building an active contributor base and reaching around 3 million installs. Roo Code also fed improvements back upstream, with Cline founder and CEO Saoud Rizwan writing on Reddit on Tuesday that it had “contributed to Cline more than anyone else” among the various forks.
“Since Cline went open source, we’ve seen countless forks — small startups to some of the largest enterprises,” Rizwan writes. “Some forks didn’t give us credit, some bought malicious ads in our Subreddit, but Roo was a good fork. They innovated, built an incredible community, and contributed to Cline more than anyone else.”
Roo Code’s trajectory also reflects how open source projects evolve through forks and shared contributions, with different teams building on the same base while competing for users. Its imminent shutdown has already prompted other projects to move in and capture that community.
Brian Turcotte, developer relations at open source coding agent Kilo Code, also writes in a blog post that the company plans to continue building in the same space, positioning its VS Code extension as an alternative for Roo Code users.
“Kilo started as a fork of Roo — we’ve been contributing back upstream since our inception, and a lot of what Kilo does well today started with the work Roo shipped first,” Turcotte wrote.
However, with the folks at Roo Code proclaiming that it “doesn’t believe IDEs are the future of coding,” Turcotte countered that view.
“The IDE is not over — far from it, actually.”
“The IDE is not over — far from it, actually,” he contends. “Every independent developer, every engineering team, every enterprise shipping production software still lives in an editor for most of their working hours. That’s not going away, and the quality of the agent sitting next to them in that environment matters enormously.”
Still, the idea that the IDE is becoming a second-class citizen isn’t exactly a novel concept, as developers spend less time writing code line by line and more time assigning and reviewing work produced by agents. In that model, the editor remains in use, but increasingly as a place to inspect and verify outputs while much of the work happens elsewhere.
This broader pattern is also reflected in recent product moves. Cursor’s latest release shifts its interface toward an agent management console, enabling developers to manage parallel tasks and long-running jobs across local and cloud environments.
Roomote control
Roo Code’s shutdown will be final come May 15, 2026, with any unused balances tied to its paid services refunded. Users relying on the extension are being directed toward alternatives such as Cline.
Rather than assisting developers step by step in an IDE, Roomote — currently on a waiting list — is designed to take a prompt and carry out tasks end-to-end, integrating with tools such as Slack, GitHub, and Linear to generate pull requests, fixes, and feature updates. It also runs the generated code and verifies the results before handing the work back for review.
Roomote
It’s worth noting that Roo Code already offered cloud-based agents in the form of Roo Code Cloud that could operate across tools such as Slack, GitHub, and Linear, allowing teams to delegate tasks outside the editor. However, those capabilities were part of a broader product suite built around its extension and supporting services. Roomote replaces that with a standalone system where the agent itself becomes the main interface, removing the need to manage multiple tools and shifting more of the development process into a single, prompt-driven environment.
Roomote also continues to be one of Roo Code’s core selling points: a model-agnostic setup that allows the agent to switch between providers depending on the task. That mirrors a broader trend across an array of open source coding agents such as OpenCode, Cline, and Kilo Code, which sit above the model layer and offer greater flexibility in how developers access and use different models.
Roo Code’s transition comes as the tools and competition in the space have rapidly evolved, with new interfaces emerging, models improving, and rival projects iterating in parallel. Rubens said this made it clear the company was focusing on an approach that no longer aligned with where development was heading.
“We made the call [to sunset Roo Code] not because Roo Code failed, but because the world it served would cease to exist,” Rubens said. “We’re letting it go because we’re already all-in on what comes next.”
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Paul is an experienced technology journalist covering some of the biggest stories from Europe and beyond, most recently at TechCrunch where he covered startups, enterprise, Big Tech, infrastructure, open source, AI, regulation, and more. Based in London, these days Paul…
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