Strengthening the OpenAI Codex Team
https://www.webpronews.com/openais-strategic-acqui-hire-how-poaching-clines-engineering-team-signals-a-new-phase-in-ai-development-race/
OpenAI's Codex is still losing the battle to its competitor, Claude Code. This might be why the company hired at least seven lead developers from Cline—one of the most famous VS Code plugins for code generation (according to informal social media reports).
Cline representatives officially stated that the company continues to operate and no official acquisition deal with OpenAI took place! This is an example of an "acqui-hire"—a strategy where a large corporation absorbs talent and expertise without officially buying the company. Google did something similar with Windsurf.
Kilo Wants to Intercept Developers
https://blog.kilo.ai/p/cline-just-acqui-hired
The situation with Cline (Kilo is essentially its fork) is bad for the community—after an "acqui-hire," project vitality usually fades: updates slow down, and decisions are made behind closed doors. Cline's future has become murky.
Therefore, anyone who previously contributed to Cline's code is being given $100 to use Kilo services. The top five developers will have a trip to the company's office in Amsterdam paid for to work together.
ChatGPT Subscription in Cline
https://blog.kilo.ai/p/use-chatgpt-subscription-inside-kilo
https://cline.bot/blog/introducing-openai-codex-oauth
Following OpenCode and Kilo Code, Cline now also allows logging in via a ChatGPT subscription to use the 5 hours/week quotas for GPT models.
#cline #kilo