My Cline cloud agents beta invitation could not have come at a better time

A couple of days ago an email landed in my inbox that I did not expect: an invitation to the Cline cloud agents beta. I had been using Cline locally for a while, mostly for the weekly refactoring passes on the game. But cloud agents are a different beast. Instead of sitting next to me in the editor, the agent gets its own environment and just works through a task on its own. I submit, it works, I come back to a branch.

Before I go on, some context that makes this invitation extra fitting: Buildom was built 100 percent with Cline. Every feature, every refactor, every one of these twenty posts worth of progress. Not “AI assisted, mostly me”. Cline wrote the code, start to finish. So an invitation to the cloud agents beta felt less like a nice surprise and more like a company I already live in opening a new wing.

I did not have to think long about what to give it first. The game project had a running refactoring wishlist, and on top of that sat one chunk I had been putting off for weeks: combat. Proper combat, not the “zombie hand touches you and you lose a heart” placeholder from day 6. Exactly the kind of work that is annoying to do by hand because it touches a dozen files at once.

Handing over the whole project

So I pointed a cloud agent at the entire game repo and let it run on GLM. And honestly, I expected to babysit it. That is usually how this goes: you kick off an agent, check in every five minutes, fix its detours, revert its “creative” decisions. This time I checked in maybe three times total, and each time the branch was in better shape than I expected.

The result is the merge that is now live. The combat system got reworked properly: a combat window with a flee rule, so enemies fully reset once a fight ends or you break away far enough. Armor items now pull their damage reduction from the item JSON, capped at 80 percent. Out-of-combat regeneration, death respawning you at the spawn point, a rabbit that hits for 10 (a ten hit kill unarmored) and a zombie hand that hurts with 25. The HP bar moved too: it now sits in the toolbar on the character slot, hue shifting from green to red, hidden while you are at full health. The old bar drawn into the top left of the canvas is gone.

And the agent did not stop at gameplay. It kept the strictness work going, updated the open items in the refactoring docs, cleaned up asset JSON along the way, and left my Telegram notify chain completely alone, exactly as I asked. Every batch landed in its own commit with a message that actually describes what happened, which sounds like a small thing but makes reviewing the whole merge so much easier.

The part that got me

What surprised me most was how uneventful it was. No broken build, no “what is this file supposed to be”, no half-finished idea abandoned halfway through. The agent read the docs I had written for it (the ai-log, the refactoring folder, the coding guidelines), followed them, and worked through the plan like a colleague who had been on the project for months. When it ran into something ambiguous, it did not guess wildly. It stuck to what was verifiable and left a note.

I know the reflexive take on this is “so you did not even build it yourself”. And sure, I did not write those 300 lines myself. But I wrote the plan, the constraints, the guidelines and every doc the agent read. It did the typing, and the typing was the part I was procrastinating on. That is a trade I will take every single time.

So, thank you to the Cline team for the invite, and honestly thank you to the agent too. That merge would have taken me a week of evenings. It took one evening of glancing at a branch and pressing merge with a grin.

What is next

The beta is still fresh, so I will keep feeding it tasks from the refactoring folder and see where the limits are. There are still open items in there: strict indexed access, minimap partial updates, dirty regions for the water simulation. If the next run goes like this one, some of those might be done before I finish writing about them. As always, you can follow along right here.