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Rizwan built the first version of Cline in his mother's garage for an Anthropic hackathon it did not win, and it grew into an open-source coding agent that its website says is trusted by more than 11 million developers.
Saoud Rizwan is founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source coding agent that inspects repositories, edits files, runs commands, and uses external tools under a developer's supervision, with whatever model the developer chooses.
Building iOS Apps at Yummygum
Earlier in his career Rizwan worked as an iOS developer at Yummygum and created Disk, an open-source Swift library for storing app data and images, according to his AI Engineer speaker profile. His other Swift projects included CardSlider, DynamicJSON, Dance, and Piano.
Shipping Claude-Dev at an Anthropic Hackathon
In July 2024, right after Claude 3.5 Sonnet came out, he built a prototype called Claude-Dev for an Anthropic hackathon, working from his mother's garage in Terre Haute, Indiana. It did not win, but it went viral after he open-sourced it, Emergence Capital wrote. Community feedback shaped features such as custom rules and planning workflows, and some early contributors joined the company.
Separating Planning from Acting
After watching developers ask agents to outline changes before writing code, Rizwan split Cline's work into Plan and Act modes, so the agent explores a repository and asks questions before it edits. He argues that bigger context windows do not stop agents from losing track of requirements, and that developers should be free to choose any model, including open-weight models, without being locked into one vendor. In January 2026 he announced five million installations and $1 million in open-source grants.
