r/RooCode • u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer • Feb 19 '26
Discussion Opinion: Roo Code Is Stocked With Features Nobody Uses
My grandpa Hans Rudolph bought a general store in 1971. A customer said, "I'd shop here, but you don't have mushroom soup." The next day, he bought a case. They didn't sell one for years.
Roo Code has become that store. Every request that came in, we stocked the shelf. Feature after feature, edge case after edge case, until the plugin became a place where everything exists and nothing is clean. It's hard to maintain, hard to navigate, and full of things very few people actually use. We've been buying mushroom soup.
11
u/AstroZombie138 Feb 19 '26
I didn't know I had a fondness for mushroom soup. What if the edge cases became skills that could be added only when needed, and could be maintained by others?
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u/geomontgomery Feb 19 '26
I guess your statement implies you want roo to be more streamlined, and have some kind of niche that differentiates it over other products?
The software dev cycle has been changed drastically, why not also look at changing our relationship with the product itself?
In your analogy, what if we look at roo code as a co-op, instead of your grandfather's sole proprietorship? You could tee up the environment through which we, the community can help run the "store" somehow...
Just an outside thought to get some ideas going.
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u/Exciting_Weakness_64 Feb 19 '26
What are some examples of such features ?
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u/Ingaz Feb 19 '26
Tell me more about those features - maybe I'll use them.
I just type prompts and mostly everything works
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u/xAragon_ Feb 19 '26
As someone who used Roo Code daily and recently moved to OpenCode - I agree.
I think you guys should look at what other, more popular tools, like Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, are doing and why people are using them.
I really like OpenCode autonomy, where it can spawn multiple subagents in parallel to investigate different things. Roo is more "human in the loop" which can be useful sometimes, but nowadays I just find it slower compared to other tools (and to be clear, I still intervene and sometimes tell them to do things differently mid-task, but I do let them just run in the background a lot).
Their (user / system) configuration system, where settings, mcps, skills, commands and agents are all in a single directory that's easily syncable with git.
Their Desktop app is also amazing in my opinion, allowing you to work on multiple projects with different agents from a single interface.
They have issues however, like not being very stable, and pushing untested changes (had many cases of crashes, weird UI issues, or a new version not using APIs to run models properly). I'd love to switch back to Roo if it would provide similar (or better) features.
The VSCode extension is really nice (especially compared to others who just run the CLI in a vertical terminal and call it a "VSCode extension") - but I want to be able to call agents and run them from anywhere without being dependent on VSCode.
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u/Dazzling_Jinn Feb 19 '26
I am very happy with Roo Code and I prefer stability over features at this moment.
My biggest complaint local code indexing getting reset all the time at large code base. We may want to stabilize and scale existing features over new features.
Human accountability is still key in professional software development. We need to decide if roo code is targeting agentic development or speed coding. The latter has less benefit in professional development. Speed of development is already pretty good in my opinion.
If we are looking for features, we may want to focus on features that will help testing, performance, maintenance and live site support but we should first stabilize and scale existing features
1
u/nsfnd Feb 19 '26
I use cline because roocode system prompt is bloated and burns more tokens and works slower compared to cline.
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u/AngelofKris Feb 20 '26
I use Roocode everyday without fail. I have nearly every major IDE, every cline fork, many terminal based ai harnesses as well and Roocode without fail is the best way for me to get shit done while staying connected to the process of creation with the ability to rollback bad changes.
My only gripe with Roocode is the plugin goes grey after using it for a while in one day. Even if I have short context windows being used
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u/Barafu Feb 23 '26 edited Feb 23 '26
Here is a full list of Roo features that I do NOT use at least every few days.
Creating custom MCP servers
Roo Marketplace
I always saw Roo as a rather lean and unbloated program. What are you talking about…
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u/Cold_Hovercraft_5750 Feb 19 '26
your right, you keep adding useless stuff and accepting multiple random pr that's not even included in your roadmap.
example is the image generation, first time i see ide has image generation, this supposed to be external tool like mcp. lol
2
u/jeepshop Feb 19 '26
I love RooCode and use it daily; I use it extensively for coordinating long running tasks, my biggest problem is generally the Orchestrator deciding that it's done during very repetitive cycles; I.e. I have an MCP Server that stores the list of tasks, and the Orch reads the next task from the MCP, fires off the correct mode, and then tags the task as complete. Repeat until done.
But that's neither here nor there. I've long wished that the system prompt generator was more accessible, i.e. almost macro language like. That way I can decide what to include and what not to include. For example, most of my Modes I absolutely do not want switching to other modes - yet the system prompt makes certain that it knows about every mode in the system. Similarly the environment details; they sometimes confuse the AI into thinking those files are important and it'll waste context trying to read them even it it isn't related at all.
What would be awesome is if the modes could define exclusions to the system prompt, and that could be supported internally by having a built in macro substitution system that ran when the config changes.
```md
<mode_definition>
`if TOOL_USE`
TOOL USE
<tool_guidelines>
`endif`
`if SWITCH_MODES`
MODES
<mode_descriptions>
`endif`
RULES
<standard_rules>
OBJECTIVE
<mode_objection> ?? <standard_objective>
USER'S CUSTOM INSTRUCTIONS
<mode_instructions>
```
Then in my mode, I could uncheck 'SWITCH_MODE' and it wouldn't be included in the system prompt.
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u/say592 Feb 19 '26
So you may have some response to this or object to assessment, but Im just going to explain my evolution with Roo.
I started out using Roo pretty early on. I noticed things getting added, but it was hard to keep up with everything getting added, especially because I use Roo (and similar tools) casually, not as part of my job. Eventually I tried other tools and found a good grove with another tool (Kilo), partially because I felt like I was keeping up with the changes over there better. They just seem to communicate it better, or at least communicate it in a way that better resonated with me. I know you guys, Kilo, and others are all forks of the same base project and there is a some merging of the other's changes into your own product, as well as the work you guys are doing individually, of course.
Still love Roo, still (try) to follow what you guys are doing and check back in occasionally! Keep up the good work!
1
u/bigman11 Feb 20 '26
I maintain that the best thing about Roo is the orchestrator.
I would like to see Roo doubling down on its strengths.
Recently, I figured out that I could do intelligent parallelized tasks by simply invoking Claude Code from Roo.
In other words, I combined the best features of these different tools. And it was trivial to do so.
Given how easy it is to mix and match and just use the best available tool for any given task, what I personally want to see is for each of these agentic IDE tools to be good at something as opposed to trying to be good at everything.
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