Kilo Code

Kilo Code is a free, MIT-licensed coding agent that lives inside VS Code or JetBrains (the IDE maker behind IntelliJ, PyCharm, and similar tools) rather than replacing your editor entirely. The core pitch is model agnosticism: you connect your own API keys for Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, or local models, and Kilo routes to whichever you choose at the provider's exact rate with no markup. With 17,000-plus GitHub stars and over 1.5 million users as of mid-2026, it has become one of the most widely adopted open-source coding agents.

Where most coding tools offer a single chat interface, Kilo Code ships with distinct agent modes — Architect for planning complex features, Code for implementation, Debug for tracing bugs, and an Orchestrator mode that chains all three in sequence for larger projects. Developers can also run multiple agents on the same problem in parallel, comparing results side by side. Every request surfaces the full prompt sent to the model and the current context window size, giving users full visibility into what the agent is doing — a notable contrast to tools that silently compress or route context.

Kilo Code originally forked from Cline and merged in ideas from Roo Code, two earlier open-source agents. It has since grown a built-in MCP server marketplace (MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets agents connect to external tools like databases and APIs), an App Builder mode for full-stack projects, and a Memory Bank feature that persists project-level context across sessions. Its $8 million seed round, raised in early 2026, is accelerating multi-agent collaboration features aimed at engineering teams.