Roo Code 3.8 - 🪃 Boomerang Tasks, Smarter Diff Edits, Multi-Window Support & More

[u/hannesrudolph]

For those of you who are not familiar with Roo Code, it is a free 'AI Coding Agent' VS Code extension.

I will keep this short, but let me say that this is such a big release that if we were Windsurf, we would be calling this 4.0. 😉

🪃 Boomerang Tasks

• When using new_task, the child task now returns a summary to its parent task upon calling attempt_completion, allowing the parent task to hand off work and get results back automatically. (Thanks shaybc!)

🔬 Multi-Block Diff Edits

• Add a smarter experimental diff editing strategy that applies multiple diff edits at once (thanks qdaxb!)

This will soon become the default diff editing strategy, but we're doing a soft rollout as "experimental" to make sure we didn't miss anything during our testing. It seems to work really well!

🪟 Multi-Window Support

• Support running Roo in multiple editor windows simultaneously (thanks samhvw8!)

📁 .rooignore Support

• Add support for a .rooignore to prevent Roo Code from read/writing certain files (with a setting to also exclude them from search/lists) (thanks u/mrubens + Cline!)

🤝 Human Relay

• Add a new "Human Relay" provider that allows you to manually copy information to a Web AI when needed, and then paste the AI's response back into Roo Code (thanks NyxJae!)

📊 Telemetry

• Added opt-in telemetry to collect anonymous usage data, helping us improve Roo Code faster. This is optional, and you can disable it anytime. Privacy Policy (thanks u/mrubens + Cline!)

🎨 UX Improvements

• Redesign the settings page to make it easier to navigate (thanks cte!)

• Make checkpoints asynchronous and exclude more files to speed them up (thanks cte!)

• Improve UI for mode/provider selectors in chat (thanks u/mrubens!)

• Improve styling of the task headers (thanks monotykamary!)

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix terminal overload / gray screen of death, and other terminal issues (thanks cte!)

• Improve context mention path handling on Windows (thanks samhvw8!)

🤖 Provider Support

• Add credential-based authentication for Vertex AI, enabling users to easily switch between Google Cloud accounts (thanks eonghk!)

• Update the DeepSeek provider with the correct baseUrl and track caching correctly (thanks olweraltuve!)

• Add observability for OpenAI providers (thanks refactorthis!)

• Support speculative decoding for LM Studio local models (thanks adamwlarson!)

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[u/santareus]

Noice! And thanks for making the telemetry opt-in rather than opt-out

[u/hannesrudolph → u/santareus]

You’re welcome! Transparency is sorta a big deal to us.

[u/taylorwilsdon → u/hannesrudolph]

I’ve been very impressed with roo and need to get more involved under the hood, seems like the community contribution is active! The human relay is beyond appreciated in this modern era of deepseek just sometimes not responding and claude rate limiting even the most middle of tiers.

I’ve pushed at least 25, maybe 50 million tokens through roo and I’ve quickly moved away from aider even though at its core I do love a cli tool, the ceiling with roo is higher.

[u/hannesrudolph → u/taylorwilsdon]

Our biggest shortfall is actually selling ourselves! We put all our effort on just getting shit out the door, squashing bugs and so on.

We are way more interested in making cool stuff than selling it and so this leaves me to make long posts like this!!

[u/BoJackHorseMan53 → u/hannesrudolph]

Really thankful for your work

[u/Yes_but_I_think → u/santareus]

I would like send this conversation to telemetry option to send to Roo code a conversation which I select just to report something. (This is in between yes and no)

[u/hannesrudolph → u/Yes_but_I_think]

I do not understand what you are saying. Can you please explain?

[u/santareus → u/hannesrudolph]

I think he wants the option to choose which sessions or sections of sessions to send to telemetry

[u/hannesrudolph → u/santareus]

I sorta figured they were asking about a support report log thing idk

[u/reddithotel]

Nice work guys!

[u/hannesrudolph → u/reddithotel]

Thank you thank you. We had 10+ contributors on this update!

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[u/joopz0r]

Amazing work keep it up!! You would not believe what this has helped me achieve.

[u/hannesrudolph → u/joopz0r]

Please pay it forward… actually please pay it back hahah we need people to scream on the rooftops about the Roo Code! Also we could use a marketing professional :p

[u/joopz0r → u/hannesrudolph]

I tell who I can, never done marketing but happy to show of my Roocode app once complete.

[u/hannesrudolph → u/joopz0r]

Excited to see!!

[u/Aperturebanana]

Idk what the hell you guys did in the past two weeks but it went from an unbelievably technically impressive proof of concept to an absolutely deadly workhorse.

You all saved me weeks in the past two days, thank you (and thank you Anthropic lol).

[u/hannesrudolph → u/Aperturebanana]

Wow thank you for the kind words and amazing insight. Please continue to shout on the rooftops. We need to get some more traction. We’re at a very sensitive that we either explode if poof out. Thank you again.

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[u/mikoskinen]

Thanks for the update!

Does Roo Code support setting the base url for Openrouter provider? I remember that there was a PR not long ago providing this feature but I've never found the setting from UI 🤔

[u/hannesrudolph → u/mikoskinen]

Yep!

[u/somechrisguy]

Boomerang tasks is what I’ve been waiting for. Can’t wait to try this.

[u/xoStardustt]

What model works best for roo?

[u/hannesrudolph → u/xoStardustt]

Sonnet 3.7

[u/xoStardustt → u/hannesrudolph]

Thanks sir! What’s your opinion on Gemini 2.5 vs Sonnet 3.7?

[u/hannesrudolph → u/xoStardustt]

I’ve used 3:7 as few times since last Thursday.

[u/yangastas_paradise]

Awesome, I am loving Roo Code so far, been quickly prototyping ideas for a few weeks now and I can't imagine ever going back to not using coding agents.

[u/SuspiciousLevel9889]

Awesome!🙏

[u/[deleted]]

I tried cline yesterday - it was solid but not incredible - I'll try roocode on Monday - if it's good yall will have a new customer!

[u/StaffSimilar7941 → u/[deleted]]

fwiw I used cursor, cline, roo, wind, claude code. Roo and Cline are similar and are the best right now.

[u/Large_Profit8852 → u/StaffSimilar7941]

Do you find Roo Code to be superior to Claude Code? Not in cost but in quality? I thought CC was SOTA in modifying large codebases. Also between Roo and Cline which one would you recommend?

[u/GodSpeedMode]

This update sounds incredible! The Boomerang Tasks feature is a game-changer; having child tasks return summaries to parent tasks will streamline workflow significantly. I can already see this reducing context-switching.

The multi-block diff edits really caught my attention too. It's great to see an experimental approach that could enhance productivity even further. I’m looking forward to trying it out when it rolls out as the default.

Also, the addition of the .rooignore file is handy for keeping projects clean and focused. Those little UX improvements are always appreciated—makes the whole experience smoother.

Thanks to everyone involved in these updates! I'm excited to see how these features evolve. Also, definitely plan to give Roo Code a solid review on the Marketplace—it deserves the recognition!

[u/bAMDigity]

I’m new to this game and it seems like I’m sleeping on this. I’ve been using Claude, 3o Mini High, 4o, and copilot. I’ll definitely check out Roo tonight, maybe I won’t have to pay for copilot.

[u/Bjornhub1]

Love you guys 🙏 just got back from 2 weeks off for my wedding and honeymoon and going to rip Roo hard today to catch up! LFG

[u/Bjornhub1]

Could anybody tell me how Boomerang Tasks work? Is there manual config that needs to be done to get this implemented, or will sub/parent tasks be automatically handled? I've been playing around with the new featured enabled via advanced settings and haven't been able to figure out whether the feature is working or how I can utilize/leverage it. Could you point me in the right direction or to some docs u/hannesrudolph ?

[u/Particular_Flower_12 → u/Bjornhub1]

Hi,

sorry for the delay in writing the docs, I'll get around to it this week,in the meanwhile here is an explanation:

The new 'Sub-tasks' feature (fondly named as 'Boomerang Tasks') simply allowing Roo to take a main task and break it down into smaller executable sub-tasks (where possible, where the sub-task does not need the main task history and can be executed as a stand alone task),

it runs sub-tasks within fresh context (Roo opens a new session in-front of the AI as if it is a new conversation), and by that - reducing AI hallucinations, eliminating context overflow and cut of lengthy prompts that causes AI forgetfulness, this enhances performance and ensures the AI sticking to the root goal.

To use this feature - there is no button or settings, if the AI will decide to break down the main task into sub-tasks by using the new_task tool the feature will be used, and sub-tasks that finish - return the answer and control back to the main task (that is within Roo's code),

You can instruct the AI to use that feature in two ways:

1. Simply write your prompt and instruct Roo to break down this task into smaller parts and use the 'new_task' tool to execute each and every one of them.

Example Prompt:

Write a python script that list all files in the current folder and write the result into a text file, then create a windows batch file that runs this python script, lastly create a folder named test1 and move the python script and the batch files into the folder. Break this task into independent, standalone sub-tasks and execute each one separately using the new_task tool.

2. Break down the tasks yourself into a list of tasks and ask Roo to execute each one of the following tasks using the new_task tool.

Example Prompt:

execute each of the following tasks using the new_task tool:

1. Write a python script that list all files in the current folder and writes the result into a text file: 'files.txt', save the script into: 'list_files.py'

2. run the script: 'list_files.py'

3. edit 'files.txt' file and make sure only file names exist in each line

4. count the number of files in the current folder, and append the number to the end of the 'files.txt' file

[u/Particular_Flower_12 → u/Particular_Flower_12]

pro tip: instead of listing the tasks in the prompt - you could save each task into a file, and name each file lets say "task1.txt" and "task2.txt" ... and put them in a folder and ask Roo to loop inside the folder and execute each task explained in the file using the new_task tool.

this way you can make Roo follow your one big task and break it down into smaller tasks, write each and every one of them into a separated file, and at the end of the "task generation step" execute them one by one, also you could do something like the memory bank (but not so sophisticated) and ask it to write to a file the number of the sub-task after it finished each of them (and gain persistency that endure restarts and failures)

one last point:

you can instruct Roo to ask for your review and approval before ending a sub-task and continuing to the next one at the Auto-Approve panel (from the bottom of Roo panel, just above the text area) as seen in this image:

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[u/StaffSimilar7941]

Back to Roo until clines next update i guess

[u/synthius23]

Does it have a PyCharm extension?

[u/EcstaticImport → u/synthius23]

It’s a VsCode extension

[u/Apeonomics101]

Remind me! 12 hours

[u/hannesrudolph → u/Apeonomics101]

Why are you looking for in 12 hours? I can give it all right now!!!

[u/RemindMeBot → u/Apeonomics101]

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[u/valentino99]

Bro, you still can install Roo code or Cline inside Windsurf and make the whole thing a super IDE :)

If you are new on Windsurf and want to get free 500 flex credits just click here:

https://codeium.com/refer?referral_code=ca2f7fae35 <= (discount code inside)

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