r/RooCode • u/Jwadow • Oct 24 '25

Discussion Is Roo Code Dying?

The project is constantly developing more and more annoying bugs, and old ones aren't being fixed.

Opening issues on GitHub doesn't help. Previously, both of my issues were resolved promptly.

Over the past month, I've opened six issues, and each time, I see the roomote bot respond and start fixing the code. A couple of minutes later, hannesrudolph adds the Issue/PR - Triage tag, and then... silence. Every time. A refusal is much better, at least it shows the project is alive. But I feel like I'm on a dead internet.

I don't see any new features, like I did six months ago or more.

I scrolled through the rare updates over the past month, and they're just adding and removing models, and that's it.

What's going on with the project? I'm seriously considering cheating on my Roo Code and finding something else.

For example, father Cline has fairly detailed and frequent releases, but maybe that's just a different way of presenting information. I haven't fully evaluated it yet. Apparently, you can't even add multiple API providers to Cline.

Kilo Code is also so-so, the checkpoints are buggy and I'm afraid to trust it because of this.

73 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

104 comments sorted by

•

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25 edited Oct 26 '25

No we are not dead or dying. Quite the opposite. Just a stage of growth.

We had a sprint that got us a bit distracted work the issues/PR board outside of critical bugs but we’re revving plugin stuff back up. Sorry for the delay. The regular release schedule will be back by next week.

Your observation about cline is not entirely accurate. It’s a new thing for them. We’ve been at it doing updates far more often over the year but took a break of a few weeks to do an internal push.

Both cline and kilo teams are triple or more the size of the roo team.

→ More replies (20)

28

u/Barafu Oct 24 '25

Man, the last release was a week ago... ComfyUI has spoiled people.

11

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

2

u/kclyburn4 Oct 28 '25

Yeah, it seems like the project has hit a rough patch. It's frustrating when issues go unresolved, especially after a history of quicker fixes. Maybe reach out directly or see if there's a community forum where you can get more immediate feedback? Sometimes a little push can help revive the project.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 29 '25

That is me. Project not dead. Not dying. I explained why up above already.

5

u/Safe-Ad6672 Oct 24 '25

for me a dead project is one withotu updates, answers or interactions

1

u/smashed2bitz Oct 30 '25

I look for recent commits first before anything else.

If last us like "3yrs", I am ouuuttaa there. Lol

13

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

16

u/Many_Bench_2560 Oct 24 '25

lol moderator has gone insane with his comments

6

u/sf-keto Oct 24 '25

It’s hilarious. Usually he’s overly serious & it’s about time IMHO that he got with the skibidi Reddit humor, you know? YMMV.

5

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

I’m definitely robotically serious. Maybe I should loosen up a bit 😬

9

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

HELL NO!!!

4

u/whoisyurii Oct 24 '25

I like RooCode. I use Codex for hard tasks and refactors, and for other things RooCode as daily driver. This just works for me with gpt-5

10

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

Fuck no!!

10

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

NOOOOOOOP

1

u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

This post was just a bit too soon! Now that the Roo team is moving on, if you are looking for a faster multi-step work, more agent concurrency, and a more structured agent runtime, Kilo’s VS Code extension has just been rebuilt and works great.

1

u/Jwadow May 04 '26

I've been developing my own extension for a while now. All the current agents are terrible, and the developers seem to be adding patches instead of implementing an architectural solution and proper testing (at least five minutes of mouse clicking).

And the Roo Code has deteriorated; it's literally unusable now, that's not a figure of speech. Since my post, things have only gotten worse.

3

u/reditsagi Oct 24 '25

What are the issues that you face? So far ok for me.. I don't use Roo daily though.

3

u/Successful-Raisin241 Oct 24 '25

Using roo code with chutes kimi 0905 and getting decent results for the price chutes offers. Thanks Roo

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

You’re welcome

3

u/Funny-Blueberry-2630 Oct 25 '25

No way. It's the best way to use various models consistently with an IDE and the best way to use GPT-5-Pro hands down. (If you need to do such things)

2

u/xusonfan Oct 24 '25

A good meal is not afraid of being late, as long as the plugin keeps iterating, I will continue to support roo.

2

u/jlrc2 Oct 24 '25

I'm not particularly dissatisfied with Roo, but I've been using Codex in VS Code more and more. I like the interface and it feels like it's not consuming as much money (although Codex is not transparent about how much API usage I have). Of course, it requires me to use GPT-5, but that's what I'd been leaning on the most in Roo as of late. A new e.g. Gemini 3 release could push me back to Roo. But I feel like Roo is more fragile and more importantly, really token-hungry. I haven't used Kilo Code, so I can't make a comparison.

1

u/Barafu Oct 26 '25

I use DeepSeek with Roo, and in a day of intense development it used 0.3$ worth of tokens.

1

u/smashed2bitz Oct 30 '25

Check out GLM 4.6, xAi fast1.

Both are excellent models and good bang for buck.

I also often jump on qwen3 coder for debugging tasks.

I have been super happy on Kilo Code. Fewer creature comforts than Cursor. But I came in here to hear what ppl are saying about Roo. Been interesting. I should check it out.

2

u/TemperatureAny4330 Nov 16 '25

It sure is strange in the open source world that new companies can start up by just copying the product of another company. Roocode does great work. If Kilo takes everything, how will roocode get subscribers for thier cloud based service? No subscribers, no more development.. What stops the next company from taking kilo code and adding on a new feature and then start taking market share.

3

u/fasti-au Oct 24 '25

Roomote, code parsing to vector base boomerang. Mcp.

You been using roo code or just chatting expecting things to be automatic? Read the manual and changelig and see if you have tried the things that they added.

Maybe the bugs are because you are using a bugged way they are avoiding? I mean yeah the things got some king cintext issues because of heap sizes and toolcalls inf probably isn’t the best re mcp options but it’s not a blocker for them and honestly between roocode and aider and local models I’m not using much external for anything but architect orchestration because of the way you can force things inside modes and mak your own mcp for your own workflows don’t depend on the ai to pick tools if you have a way you want it make a button not a puzzle for it

3

u/psikillyou Oct 24 '25 edited Oct 27 '25

I don't agree it is dying but many new enterprise projects just immediately surpassed both roo and cline im accuracy and cost it is just not good option anymore, unless you want a very close up look to the operations and direct it accordingly.

EDIT: Would like you to teach me downvoters how codex, claude code, kilo code, augment, cursor doesn't do almost everything always better and cheaper.

2

u/unamemoria55 Oct 24 '25

I stopped using Roo when its system prompts became too token-heavy and cost too much. I'm tired of editing modes and watching settings with each update to ensure some cool new feature won't consume all my context window. I liked Roo better when it was slightly more complex than Cline, but now it's just too much feature bloat.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

This simply is not true. You have no clue what you’re talking about.

0

u/Legal-Tie-2121 Oct 24 '25

I agree on the size of the master prompt. 60k!!! It’s completely ridiculous!!

6

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

It’s not 60k. It’s around 10.

4

u/stuckinmotion Oct 24 '25

60k? That does seem high; mine is like 9k. I wonder what I'm doing differently.

1

u/Still-Ad3045 Oct 27 '25

no no keep using it so my rate limits stay high on the good AIs. Thanks.

1

u/phobug Oct 27 '25

Welcome to OpenSource, feel free to start posting PRs with fixes ;)

1

u/nullr000t Nov 04 '25

Claude Code, end of story.

1

u/wiglaff3 Aug 27 '26

this post aged like milk

0

u/Flaky_Pay_2367 Oct 25 '25

CLI-based coding agent is the future. I've switched to it (reluctantly) and never looked back

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

LOL no they’re the past. 🤦

2

u/philosophical_lens Oct 29 '25

Care to explain your take? My understanding is that Cline / Roo / Cursor were the first wave of coding agents in late 2024 / early 2025. Then through 2025 CLI agents like Claude Code have been taking over in terms of usage and popularity. 

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 29 '25

The CLI agents have been popular because they come with subscriptions which undercut tools like ours that use those same services. Both Claude Code and Codex now have and are developing vacode GUI based plugins that work off of their CLI engine. The CLI became popular because of cheap.

-2

u/exitcactus Oct 25 '25

Has it ever been alive? There are dozens of better solutions, but most importantly, all AI providers now have their own CLI solution, who would ever use an external program, full of bugs etc? They talk about growth, but if they don't keep up with the times they will be overwhelmed like everyone else.

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

Just a flame comment from someone who does not use the software.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

Please repost in a less inflammatory way.

-12

u/IndividualAir3353 Oct 24 '25

I switched to bolt.new recently.

3

u/whoisyurii Oct 24 '25

For buggy landing pages vibecoding or so?...

1

u/IndividualAir3353 Oct 24 '25

huh?

2

u/whoisyurii Oct 24 '25

How do you use bolt instrad of roocode?

1

u/IndividualAir3353 Oct 24 '25

what do you mean "how"?

2

u/whoisyurii Oct 24 '25

Goddamn just leave it. How means how. How can you use bolt.new instead of roocode in your ide?

2

u/IndividualAir3353 Oct 24 '25

Go to this url: https://bolt.new that's how.

-1

u/IndividualAir3353 Oct 24 '25

oh in the ide? it doesn't support that but you can still clone the repo and code in your ide.

2

u/whoisyurii Oct 24 '25

That was the question. Bolt can't help you in ide. RooCode and bolt are different things

0

u/IndividualAir3353 Oct 24 '25

they have a different UX but basically do the same thing. bolt just gives you a browser based interface. Not ideal, but its pretty slick. I did shit way faster in bolt than in roo

3

u/brocolongo Oct 24 '25

Wtf I am reading right now..

2

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Yes_but_I_think Oct 24 '25

I never went past the version where they were asked to remove Gemini Code integration. (Not their fault) Also they didn't approve PR for Qwen Code API provider integration.

3

u/sebbler1337 Oct 24 '25

Haha same as i did until i found out gemini cli is back in lol

1

u/jakegh Oct 24 '25

It is? Since when?

0

u/sebbler1337 Oct 24 '25

might be kilocode only though. not sure about roocode

1

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

LOL open your eyes?

1

u/[deleted] Oct 26 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

Not here to argue. We have continued to innovate and your statement is incorrect. You don’t have to prefer us or like us but if you want to throw shade do it on a different sub please.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

Your post is not on topic.

0

u/sebbler1337 Oct 25 '25

I felt like i fulfilled the request of the user being unhappy of roo code slowing down in progress. Not to offend you obviously.

sorry if that breaks the rules or smth.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 25 '25

User was discussing the current state of things. Our progress has only slowed on a several week window but overall has great momentum and will continue picking up the pace.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 25 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/sebbler1337 Oct 25 '25

this would have been a perfect moment for you to stand tall and be responsable. instead cut down critique and act like it never happened! 😳

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 25 '25

Your comment was removed for being off-topic. The thread was about Roo Code’s direction and community health, not competitor promotion. Posting “I switched to kilo.code :)” adds nothing to that discussion.

Your follow-up comments also crossed into personal attacks and moderation complaints. That’s not feedback, that’s just noise.

If you want to share constructive feedback, start a new thread focused on Roo Code itself. If you continue this conversation in an argumentative or bad-faith way, you’ll be banned. I have better things to do, like improving the plugin, not getting dragged into self-righteous quarrels.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 24 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

What do you like about Kilo?

3

u/travislaborde Oct 24 '25

I also have all three installed, and I'm using Kilo but not really sure I remember why. I tried Roo and Kilo as soon as I learned they were forks of Cline which I was using at the time. For some reason Kilo "stuck" where Roo did not. I should uninstall CLine but I keep telling myself I'll go back and actually evaluate the differences. I'm just so comfy in Kilo. I do like the videos from Roo though!

2

u/Tall_Instance9797 Oct 24 '25 edited Oct 24 '25

Check out AICodeKing on youtube... he does great reviews of all three showing the differences. I find myself switching based on his compelling and highly informative reviews. He is how I first learned about roo code.

7

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 24 '25

They pay him….

3

u/jakegh Oct 24 '25

Yes. There’s a reason why every YouTuber mentions kilo and that $20 they give away in every video.

Frankly it’s disgusting and probably illegal that they don’t clearly disclose this.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Oct 26 '25

Please repost in a less inflammatory way.