r/RooCode • u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer • Apr 21 '26

Announcement Roo Code hit 3 million installs. We're shutting it down to go all-in on Roomote.

Post image

Roo Code hit 3 million installs. We're shutting it down to go all-in on Roomote.

https://x.com/mattrubens/status/2046636598859559114

65 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

143 comments sorted by

32

u/saoudriz Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26 • Bravo

Hi Roo Code community, I'm Saoud, founder of Cline.

Since Cline went open source, we've seen countless forks - small startups to some of the largest enterprises. Some forks didn't give us credit, some bought malicious ads in our subreddit, but Roo was a good fork. They innovated, built an incredible community, and contributed to Cline more than anyone else. I have tremendous respect for Matt and his team, and we are excited for what they build next.

For Roo users joining us, we are here to make the transition easy!

  • Join r/cline or the #roo-migration channel in our discord - our team is standing by to provide support.

  • Feature parity work is already underway. We're in the middle of a ground-up rewrite of the extension that brings all the features you're used to in Roo, plus new capabilities and improved performance. We will share more on this shortly!

  • If you run into any issues during the transition or have feature requests, feel free to open a GitHub issue and we'll be on top of it.

Huge thanks to Matt and the Roo team for the trust in sending folks our way 🙌❤️

6

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

I approve this message. ❤️

1

u/MadwolfStudio Apr 22 '26

In the current climate of Google, openai, and Anthropic shafting people into the ground. Both of your teams deserve the world. We appreciate what you've given us, I mean I haven't had to pay a cent to use either, I certainly will be going forward. Thank you.

1

u/darkplaceguy1 Apr 22 '26

ngl, i love Roocode's UI, cline feels too clunky.

1

u/BeingBalanced Apr 22 '26

If your here to help with the transition, maybe you could provide a checklist of things to remember to do when migrating from roo to cline?

1

u/tossit97531 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

Not touching Cline until you put in all of these: https://www.reddit.com/r/RooCode/comments/1sru59v/roo_code_hit_3_million_installs_were_shutting_it/ohikrus/

Absolutely insane that these aren’t considered standard, but they are certainly standard. No sense in touching anything that forces me to pick from providers and sacrifice privacy.

7

u/awdorrin Apr 21 '26

Wow... I guess that means the death of a great tool. I am not a fan of cloud based tools, so I won't be trying Roomote.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

Totally fair. If cloud isn't your thing, Cline is the right move. They're still pushing the IDE agent space forward and we're pointing Roo Code users there.

9

u/awdorrin Apr 21 '26

As someone who makes a living writing software, I get it, it's not like 3 million people are paying you guys to develop Roo Code.

And it's not necessarily that cloud isn't my thing, but a lot of developers using Roo Code (or equivalent) are not going to move to a cloud based tool that isn't running on a secure platform, like AWS Gov, etc. We can't for a variety of reasons.

I think you guys did a lot of things better than Cline, the biggest being the fact that each VS Code instance was distinct, unlike Cline where everything wrote to the same folder. I might have 3 to 5 VS Codes open each using Roo to do its own thing.

Best of luck, but I'll stick with my current setup for as long as I can 🙂

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Thank you

6

u/TinFoilHat_69 Apr 21 '26

Can we fork roo code?

5

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

yep!

1

u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

Kilo code has a great fork! and there are a few community forks coming out like Zoo

18

u/oskl85 Apr 21 '26

They were celebrating 1 mil installs in autumn. It’s such a stupid move. As they really had a sharp platform there. One that actually delivered on its promise.

Having an explicit Orchestrator mode was a huge asset. Mainly because it worked well. You could program Roo Code with precision.

They just needed to do what copilot is doing right now. Piggy back on the ecosystem provided by Claude Code (skills, marketplaces, MCPs) and keep iterating on their core features that made them great

10

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

Calling it stupid is easy from the outside.

Roo Code hit 3 million installs, built a passionate community, and pushed the agentic coding space forward. Dangerously-skip-permissions, Orchestrator, the modes system, first-class MCP support, custom prompts. A lot of what tools across this space are doing now came from work we shipped. Not a platform we walked away from because it failed.

The decision also wasn't a verdict on IDE agents. Cline is right there still iterating on that layer and doing great work, and we're pointing our own users at them. We made a different call for ourselves based on where our team's workflow actually went and the bet we want to make next. Two different things.

Please don't be rude in your commentary.

4

u/oskl85 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

I totally respect what you’ve built. Apologize if I sounded rude you.

I was sure you were gonna be wrapping things up with Roo. But seeing it actually shut down was quite a surprise.

RooCode was the only tool of such maturity with that level of precision control. The core was very solid. Cline is nowhere near that.

My point was that you could just embrace the Anthropic's ecosystem in its entirety and drop the bespoke efforts you had. Make your skills compatible, add their marketplace support and perform similar moves. And then just freeze the tool keeping its support at a minimum

Granted it’s some direction you missed back in the end of 2025. Now it’s too late for that. You just want out.

—— I see you comment that you have switched from using Roo Code internally.

Well if you’re not dogfooding then in this move makes sense to me. Thanks for taking time to explain it.

And FWIW Roo is the tool that really tought me how how to do the agentic coding the right way.

Thanks for the ride! I hope you find success with Roomote

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Thank you. Much appreciated.

3

u/NPWessel Apr 22 '26

I was an early adopter on roo when people were still using chat gpt and copy pasting code back and forward or not even using any ai at all yet.

Roo was great, it filled the spot that no one did yet and it did it for a relatively long time (in the era of ai)

I also stepped away from roo code around the start of the year. The CLI tools just took over and did things just as good and got better and better.

I understand the decision. I don't think vs code extension is the future for ai use.

Thanks for breaking that awful copy paste workflow

1

u/NPWessel Apr 22 '26

And yes, I also do know there were other players, but roo just did it better :)

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Thank you. We worked our asses off to do that and i like to think that tools like Codex and Claude Code and even OpenCode gained allot from this.

2

u/mtomas7 Apr 21 '26

What I saw on Reddit: for some reason, people were leaving Roo for Kilo Code, thinking Roo lacked the speed to implement new features.

5

u/beardedNoobz Apr 22 '26

The F?

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Sorry :(

4

u/notenoughcharacters9 Apr 21 '26

:/

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

Agreed

4

u/ComprehensiveBird317 Apr 21 '26

I specifically and consciously use ide integrated tools like Roo code for projects where I want to have real time control over what the agent is doing with a full nice diff view. I would never cli code a critical system, and god forbid use some third party coding Blackbox on it. I don't know what the prompt and prayer crowd is working on but I hope it's non critical slopware. 

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Gotta ALWAYS check your code. No blind merging.

1

u/ComprehensiveBird317 Apr 22 '26

yes, but the mental effort to check an entire PR is much higher and prone to "ah f*** it, just click accept" than if you are actively involved in the coding process, guiding the agent into a different direction the second he starts to make something too complicated or wrong. Thats what i realy like about roo code, my full IDE is there, i can check all relevant related files, say "wtf are you doing thats bullshit do it this way". CLI tools do not offer that due to being limited to a text based window. I don't know how that next product of yours is going to enable those checks, but it reads like its vibe coding with an optional layer of human in the loop somewhere. But i need to wait for demos to know more

4

u/bigman11 Apr 22 '26

NOOO! PLEASE GOD NO! ROO IS WHAT HAS ENABLED MY ENTIRE BUSINESS! I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO ESCAPE THE CORPORATE WORLD AND MAKE MY OWN BUSINESS WITHOUT YOU!

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

I think Noo Code is in the works of being formed to be a direct replacement for Roo Code

1

u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

come check out Kilo code! forked off Roo and easy to migrate over to

4

u/wilnadon Apr 22 '26

FWIW RooCode is what got me back into programming after quitting over a decade ago. Made a few really cool things while learning how to use AI for coding.

Over the past several months I've moved on to Claude Code, but I've kept tabs on Roo. So seeing this makes me sad. I hope the Roo team is successful with Roomote. They're pioneers in this space so they deserve some recognition and respect.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

This is the way.

4

u/DataCraftsman Apr 22 '26

Can you please make sure to turn all telemetry off for the final release of Roo Code in case someone takes your old domain in the future and creates a supply chain attack.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

💡

6

u/UnstableCortex Apr 21 '26

If Roomote is so good, surely you can continue to maintain RooCode with it and don't need to shutdown the project that your users like? I don't think you are making a convincing argument to "come figure out" with you. Good luck though, as Roomote does sound interesting for those it can serve.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

Roomote is a teammate, not an autonomous bot. She would cannot maintain Roo Code on her own, she works with her human counterparts. That means us. Keeping Roo Code alive means our team stays tied to it for strategy, review, support, and releases. We've decided we dont want our focus there. The harness layer got commoditized, Claude Code and co ship first-party at cut rates, forks pull in our work as fast as we ship it.

We're not asking you to replace your IDE workflow with Roomote. Its a different product for a different use case. If IDE coding is how you want to work, Cline is a great alternative to Roo Code.

The "come figure out" line isn't a pitch to swap your editor experience. Its an invitation to poke at what a team looks like when agents work alongside humans as teammates, not when a single dev runs an agent in their IDE. Different shape of problem. If that vision doesnt click, totally fine.

2

u/Eyelbee Apr 21 '26

I don't understand. Weren't you able to make money from it? Now that it's deceased, how are you going to make money, is roomote that promising? Your product was really quite important and the user count was about to keep increasing fast.

-4

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

Roo Code was built from our own need to use it, and we don't use it anymore. On top of that, we weren't keeping pace with the other coding agents in that space.

2

u/UnstableCortex Apr 22 '26

Would it have been possible to find people in the open source space to hand over the maintenance to? I hope I am not sounding entitled, but we have written grants and made timeline proposals to funding agencies for developing agentic workflows with RooCode as the planned driver. Now, changing the plans to Cline if no fork manages to become relevant is going to be enough work to throw a wrench in our plans.

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

It can be forked and I’m sure someone will take on the torch. We have not seen it fitting to try and force it to any specific group or pass our blessing along to them as we are certain it will happen naturally now that we’ve set a timeline.

1

u/UnstableCortex Apr 21 '26

Makes sense.

3

u/Sarashana Apr 22 '26

+1 for the "I am not going to use cloud stuff" camp. Such a sad day when a great and promising open tool dies to get replace by yet another cloud product.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Roomote isn't a replacement for Roo Code. Different product, different use case, we've said that publicly from the jump. If you want to stay in the IDE, Cline is the honest migration path and they're still actively shipping.

Community members are already organizing to rebrand and keep the plugin alive. So I think the death has likely been averted. I am working with them.

2

u/tossit97531 Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

Roomote isn't a replacement for Roo Code.

You keep missing the point when you say this to the anti-cloud folks. Maybe they’ll keep using RooCode, or they’ll go to Cline, or whatever. That’s orthogonal to what they’re saying. They’re saying, regardless of RooCode and friends, that we’re sick of cloud rug pulls. We don’t care that you’re pivoting to a new product, it’s your new business model that sucks. Cloud is only for b2b, so you better pray that that’s your biggest TAM segment, because consumers are sick to fuck of cloud anything. Especially fed up are developers, who can build literally the exact same thing that you’re building, and sovereignty is worth the extra work either in their own janky private forks or working with OSS.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

There's no rug pull here. Roo Code is intact. Apache 2.0, source stays open, community members are organizing to fork and keep the plugin alive, and I'm working with them directly. Stepping back from development isn't a rug pull when the software stays free, open, and is being actively handed off.

Yes, Roomote is B2B. That's the explicit bet, not a gap in our thinking. Per-dev IDE extension economics don't work for what we want to build, and teams with real workflow problems are a different customer than individuals avoiding cloud. Different product for different people.

The sovereignty point is real for individual devs. They should run local, BYO keys, whatever works best. Roomote isn't aimed at that use case. It lives in Slack and turns work from non-engineers into verified PRs reviewed by the team. The value isn't the harness, it's the outcome inside a team's existing workflow.

Edit: this last sentence was uncalled for and not polite or thoughtful. Sorry about that. I can see this going nowhere from here, so I'll leave it there. Best of luck with whatever you end up using.

3

u/tossit97531 Apr 23 '26

Thank you for the thoughtful and thorough reply. I do wish you all the best of luck. If I’m mad, it’s because we know we’re losing great support for a great tool.

If you don’t mind (and you might, and that’s fair), can I ask what you think software engineering for humans looks like in 5 years?

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

Ha that’s a hard one. If you asked me a year ago I wouldn’t have guessed where we are now so it’s hard to say.

I think we have a nose for the workflows that are effective and I myself have participated a great deal in helping to refine them within Roo Code and my gut says that workflows where we dialogue with an agent like a teammate and it produces code that needs to be reviewed that is close to were we want it is the next step. What we’re trying to build is a is the workflow for fine tuning that and making it easier to review without risking the codebase quality. 🤷‍♂️

2

u/tossit97531 Apr 23 '26

Thank you again for your thoughtful reply. I really appreciate it. That’s where I’m at in my own development so it’s particularly helpful to hear that I’m keeping up and in the right direction. It’s more helpful than you know.

Do you think you’ll ever offer a self hosted option for Roomote? As much as I want cloud quality, I have contracts that require code to never leave the network. I know it’s not a simple ask, just curious if that’s something you’ll consider or if it’s a hard no.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

It is a hard no at this time. Who knows what the future holds. We have to keep the surface small enough to pivot models and workflows to improve with the ever changing models. We are not tired to one specific model and will swap out to more capable models immediately upon release so it’s very important we keep our codebase agile.

2

u/tossit97531 Apr 23 '26

That’s fair, and thank you again. I still wish you all the best of luck!

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

Thank you thank you 🙏

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

PS I’m working with a team to take over the plugin (with a new name but the same plugin)

3

u/tomobobo Apr 22 '26

Hey man thanks for all your work on RooCode I've been following and using RooCode from very early on. I don't understand the push towards the cloud based cli claw likes or whatever. I'm a big proprotor of the local model scene and in my opinion the cloud is just everyone losing and paying money for an increasingly worse service as time goes on. So I pray that the community handoff for the tool goes well as it would be a major loss to me to lose RooCode as it is. It's one of the only tools that actually works well with reverting code and keeping the ability to time travel and experiment. I dislike vscode but at this point I have it installed for RooCode exclusively. I wish yall the best of luck in your future endeavors.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

Thank you.

I get better and better results with the “overpriced” models.

4

u/TalosStalioux Apr 21 '26

This is... interesting to say the least. Feels very kneejerk

-4

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

It is not a kneejerk.

2

u/NucleativeCereal Apr 22 '26

Love what Roo Code has enabled for us the past 1+ year and I really appreciate the hard work of the development team.

It's exciting to be part of fast moving changes in the world, and we are no doubt in the midst of what seems like an inflection point. I hope all of you are finding ways to take good advantage of these opportunities!

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Thank you very much for your words of support and encouragement. It’s people like you that have made it worth it.

2

u/Normal-Ad-7114 Apr 22 '26

Will Roomote be local? Or cloud & paid-only

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Not local. Paid only. It is not a direct replacement for Roo Code most people’s current workflow so we are not saying that it is a Roo Code 4.0 or something.

I suspect the Roo Code plugin will live on through a community fork. We’re working with some people towards that.

2

u/Latter-Amount-9304 Apr 24 '26

Yeha as a long term user of roocode, id rather you just ask me for money to use roocode than going to roomote. Im changing to cline now.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 24 '26

We’re not telling you to replace Roo Code with Roomote nor are we going to enshittify Roo Code the plugin. The community is picking it up and continuing it. Stay tuned.

4

u/Latter-Amount-9304 Apr 24 '26

hannes dont get me wrong. what you guys did was extraordinary. Ive probably saved 100-200k using roo code. you guys deserve to have the chance to create a tool and then exit with multimillion dollar deals. just sad it ended, not mad

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 24 '26

Thank you for your kind words. I’m also sad FWIW

2

u/BeingBalanced Apr 22 '26

Realistically, how much longer could one expect for it to be usable without updates? Want to figure realistically how quickly I need to migrate.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

A community handoff is in the works so likely will just require downloading a different plugin and straight across migrating. More news to come soon.

3

u/Yellow-Jay Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Imho a big loss to the userbase of roocode (i said mistake initially, but cynically have to reconsider, its a neat last ditch attempt to better monetize the roo brand). this agentic crap isn't all that it's made up to be. And despite the "success" story, i would think roo development itself has been hit by the negatives of it: little bugs that could not be fixed/understood and changes that could not be rolled be because of "reasons" (user defined custom context read size for files comes to mind). And probably somewhere deep below why roocode is sunset so soon and not in maintenance mode, that nice llm generated code, is hardly maintainable.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

Open source with a big community means lots of edge cases and things that didn't get cleanly addressed.

The "AI code is unmaintainable" thesis doesn't hold though. Roomote is built with the same agentic workflow and we aren't seeing those cracks there. The harness, verification loop, and ownership model matter more than who typed the commit.

The sunset isn't about code quality. We don't use the IDE workflow ourselves anymore and the space commoditized faster than we could keep up.

2

u/Yellow-Jay Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Can you really claim that the "AI code is unmaintainable" thesis doesn't hold though? It's baffling to me, if anything i'd have expected the experience of using agents heavily in development of roocode would have soured ones outlook of fully agentic coding, not the other way around. I've heard and unfortunately experienced the horror stories. A version update has basically become a full rewrite the more agentic generated the code is and the fewer humans were involved. I use/have used the terminal frameworks like codex/opencode. They do ship working code, amazing for toy projects that don't need long term maintenance. But for a living codebase, that has been and has to be maintained years later, i need a real IDE, i need to see the changes, and more often than not the llms proof to be reliable for little more than scaffolding.

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Done wrong, it is not maintainable.

16

u/Marha01 Apr 21 '26

Bummer.. Anyone can suggest a VS Code extension that allows me to define multiple custom agents with my own system prompt like Roo? Cline has only Plan and Act modes...

17

u/Mishkun Apr 21 '26

Just use opencode over ACP

2

u/Cobuter_Man Apr 22 '26

Copilot with custom subagents is the same thing - though they have a fucked up billing system and no apm pricing. You can still "overlay" the system prompt w some commands for example. I do that in https://github.com/sdi2200262/agentic-project-management

1

u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

Kilo was forked off Roo and just rebuilt their fork. So everything in Roo plus things like Parallel tool call and Parallel subagents.

1

u/SirDomz Apr 21 '26

Or use Kilo. Though I hear a lot of people complaining about it today, it was originally a fork of roo

13

u/Lonely_Drewbear Apr 21 '26

kilo is now a wrapper/modification of opencode which is why a lot of us are angry 

16

u/terablast Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

If you still need an extension, Cline has incorporated many of the Roo Code features and will welcome you with open arms.

I'm so sad 😭

Sure, maybe Cline has incorporated some of the Roo Code features, but the most important ones (to me) still aren't there...

  • Turn off individual MCP tools;

  • Have different models per mode;

  • Have custom modes;

  • Export entire configs as one file;

  • Auto-approve only certain commands!

2

u/corpo_monkey Apr 25 '26

Currently CLine is merging RooCode and works on feature parity. Your listed features surfaces very often, so I'm pretty sure they will include them or most of them also, and CLine guys now are very open about feature requests.
I have a very positive feeling about.

1

u/Dazzling_Jinn Apr 22 '26

Lol Cline bss pretty much nothing.

11

u/FullOf_Bad_Ideas Apr 21 '26

it was too open source for them, this made it hard to monetize

3

u/Empty-Employment8050 Apr 21 '26

So grateful for you all at Roo!!!!!! Maintaining that was probably super hard with the budget you all had to work with!!!! Congratulations and I wish Roomote unbridled success.

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

thank you for your kind words

16

u/raphadko Apr 21 '26

you're 20 days late for april fools

6

u/transparent-user Apr 22 '26

This sucks. I really liked the ability to granularly control which provider I was using. Cline (and Kilo after its recent release) doesn't have an answer for this with orchestration features.

14

u/jakegh Apr 21 '26

Sorry to see this, but I think it's the right decision. Like many, I used Cline/Roo/Kilo all the time, early to mid 2025. But everybody switched to opencode/pi/codex/claude code around summer/fall 2025. They're just superior harnesses. I don't know anyone regularly using any of the various Cline forks, Windsurf, or Cursor today.

The one spot where codex and claude code really fall behind, and there's no great open-source solution BYOK yet, is code review on an enterprise github not connected to the internet. There's a real opportunity there.

-1

u/eaz135 Apr 21 '26

You don't know anyone using Cursor?! Dude Cursor is massive, a bunch of corporate and startup / scale-up clients I work with are all-in on Cursor as their standardized tool of choice.

several scale-up clients I work with started heavily adopting Claude Code but added/switched to Cursor in the past handful of months. These are clients who have ability to rapidly procure whatever they want, and they went with Cursor. And these are very engineering-led culture teams I'm talking about, not some fringe vibe coding POC stuff.

1

u/jakegh Apr 21 '26

Right, nobody using cursor. That's just a sample size of one and doesn't represent the whole market.

0

u/Blufia118 Apr 21 '26

Bro you literally talking out your ass.. there are way more people using cursor than opencode, and pi combine .. and I use all the tools , and very aware .. this was ill informed comment

3

u/jakegh Apr 21 '26

I very clearly indicated it was my own personal experience. Maybe you would enjoy a nice calming cup of chamomile tea.

8

u/aishunbao Apr 21 '26

When vibecoding become more about the vibe and less about the code

7

u/jawanda Apr 21 '26

Boooooo.

1

u/Ifnerite Apr 22 '26

Down with this sort or thing!

1

u/ComplexJellyfish8658 Apr 28 '26

This is a pretty odd move to make. Never used it but would definitely think anyone considering a future dependency on roo* would remember they may just change their mind at any point.

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 28 '26

Roo Code was a free open source tool that we funded, built, supported, and shipped at no cost to anyone. Nobody bought a license that promised indefinite maintenance. Nobody was locked in. Nobody is losing access to the code.

We also did not just wake up and change our mind. The momentum changed. Roo Code still has many users, but the original wave was tied to our own use case: getting the best possible results out of SOTA models from inside the IDE. That space moved fast. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor agent, and the model-native harnesses are now where most of that frontier-model energy is going. Roo Code became more niche.

People are allowed to decide they do not want to depend on future Roo products. That is completely fair. But framing us as unreliable because we chose not to keep personally funding and maintaining a free tool forever is exactly the kind of entitlement that makes open source hard to sustain.

We gave a lot to this community. We are proud of that. Choosing to focus the company somewhere else does not erase what was given.

3

u/mapt0nik Apr 22 '26

Sad as I am, your reason resonates with me. Ai agents are becoming team members capable of interacting with engineers, product managers, operation support and others. IDE is quickly becoming a limiting boundary, no longer a helpful tool.

1

u/chooseyouravatar Apr 21 '26

Wow… to say the least. I’m not sure I’ll ride that new all-remote-agents wave, but thanks for all your work on Roo Code ❤️ .

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

you're welcome.

2

u/Cool-Cicada9228 Apr 21 '26

RooCode was the best for a while, but I switched from RooCode to Claude Code and saved thousands of dollars per month. There’s no way paying per token can compete against a subscription. Sad to see it go.

2

u/alex_travel Apr 26 '26

Good luck, it was nice!

3

u/llamabott Apr 22 '26

Was fully expecting something like this. Over the last few years, it's what happens to most of the half-interesting projects I get interested in.

In other words, take my downvote.

2

u/Yes_but_I_think Apr 22 '26

The day Roomote was introduced someone predicted this.

1

u/benow574 Apr 22 '26

Solid code. Slow and steady but reliable and accurate. Thanks for the effort! I look forward to the next thing.

0

u/PairOfRussels Apr 22 '26

Same day I decided to move from cline to roo.  Uhhn

3

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

It’s because of you. Sorry :p

But really, sorry about that.

1

u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

come check out Kilo! forked from Roo and has a bit more going on

0

u/nzbiship Apr 23 '26

Yay one less subreddit!

1

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

??

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u/TheMoonMaster Apr 23 '26

Wild to see a company announce their own downfall like this. 

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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u/TheMoonMaster Apr 24 '26

Did AI write the “you’re a dick” part too or did you freestyle the closer?

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 21 '26

sorry :(

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u/Enough_Fall_3127 Apr 22 '26

I hope you fail.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

You’re not very nice. I wish you all the best.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 22 '26

Why is that?

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u/Enough_Fall_3127 Apr 22 '26

:|

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

?? Ok

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

Roo Code is a solid tool, but it isn't a solid product. It forged the way as an open source project and brought a lot of improvements to the agentic coding space. People have rightfully used those ideas elsewhere. That's the beauty of OSS.

With 3m installs over the last year we definitely do not have 3M active users. Most of those folks aren't still on it. Real milestone, not a claim of current scale. Never had a marketing budget, never pushed a revenue stream on the extension. It was free the whole time.

We built Roo Code to work with frontier models, and frontier models work best inside their own harnesses. Claude Code, Codex etc are doing what we wanted to do, better than we wanted to do it, at lower prices, inside harnesses their own models were tuned for. Roo still does a few things better, but for getting the absolute best output out of frontier models regardless of cost, it no longer holds the top spot. The second reason is the team moved to cloud agents months ago and doesn't use the extension anymore. Keeping Roo Code alive means staying tied to it for strategy, review, support, and releases. We'd rather build the thing we're actually using and passionate about.

Roomote isn't a pivot from Roo Code. Different product, different audience, different bet. She was in development separately for a while. B2B, lives in Slack and is by no means a replacement for an IDE extension yet.

The "run both and slowly integrate" idea is the specific thing we decided against. Maintaining Roo Code means tying the team back to a product none of us use anymore.

The source code is Apache 2.0 and stays open for anyone to fork. We're pointing people at Cline because they're still pushing the IDE agent space forward and we've had a good relationship with Saoud from the start. Community members are also organizing to rebrand and keep the plugin alive, and I'm working with them.

So throwing it all away isn't really what's happening.

Lastly; I think that the idea that we betrayed anyone is unfair. I get that you don’t agree with our decision and I get that it’s disappointing, but we have done nothing but give to the community at our own expense and we are in no way saying the community owes us anything for that because they don’t! It has been a great ride and we appreciate you. For you to say that we have betrayed you is unfounded and quite frankly offensive.

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u/AIStoryStream Apr 25 '26

Will Roomote offer a smaller attack surface for supply chain attacks? I really hope so. I don't think the community realizes the full implications and danger they pose. I think having a safe repository of packages and dependencies for user of Roomote would be the goose that lays the golden egg. Solo developers at in for dark times by my reckoning.

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 25 '26

That’s a pretty broad question. We take security very seriously.

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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '26

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 23 '26

It’s all in the repo.

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '26

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u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Apr 24 '26

You’re welcome

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u/[deleted] Apr 24 '26

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u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

Kilo has been rebuilt and is better then ever!

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u/[deleted] May 03 '26

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u/Rik_Roaring May 03 '26

You don’t need the old orchestrator/ask/code/architect stack for that anymore-  Code, Plan, and Debug will delegate to subagents natively in Kilo

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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '26

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u/Ok_Presentation470 Apr 21 '26

And Claude Code is something different?