Roomote logo — the cloud coding agent from the former Roo Code team Image: Roomote / RooCodeInc
by VibecodedThis

Roo Code Is Shutting Down. The Team Is Betting on Cloud Agents Instead.

Roo Code — the open-source VS Code agent with 24K GitHub stars and 3 million installs — was archived on May 15. The team says IDEs aren't the future of coding, and has pivoted to Roomote, a Slack-native cloud agent.

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Roo Code — once one of the most popular open-source AI coding agents for VS Code — shut down on May 15, 2026. The GitHub repository, which had accumulated 24,100 stars and 3.3 thousand forks, was archived that day and is now read-only. Roo Code Cloud and Roo Code Router are also closed, and unused paid balances are being refunded.

The team’s stated reason is direct: they don’t believe IDEs are the future of coding.

What happened

Roo Code launched as a fork of Cline (then called Claude Dev) and grew quickly. Three million installs and a strong community of contributors built it into a capable agent that let developers run Claude, GPT, Gemini, and other models inside VS Code with full file system access and custom mode support.

The shutdown covers everything the team had built around that extension: the VS Code plugin itself, the hosted Roo Code Cloud product, and the Roo Code Router that let users route API calls through a managed proxy. All three are done.

The GitHub repo is archived but still accessible. The extension will continue to work as-is for users who already have it installed — there’s no kill switch. But there will be no more updates, bug fixes, or security patches.

The new thing: Roomote

The team is now building Roomote, a cloud-based autonomous coding agent. Rather than running inside your editor, Roomote operates through Slack and a web dashboard. You assign it tasks through a Slack message or through integrations with Linear, GitHub, Jira, Sentry, Notion, and roughly 20 other tools.

Roomote spins up an isolated container, clones your repo, does the work on a branch, verifies the result by actually running the application, and then opens a pull request. The pitch is that a PM or founder can kick off a bug fix from Slack without needing to open an IDE.

It’s currently in early access. The website shows a waitlist, not a public pricing page.

Where Roo Code users are going

The Roo Code team themselves recommend Cline for users who want a model-agnostic open-source VS Code extension. Cline has roughly 3.85 million installs as of May 2026 and has incorporated a significant amount of what Roo Code built over the past year.

The closer drop-in replacement is Kilo Code. Kilo started as a fork of Roo Code in 2025 and has since been rebuilt around the OpenCode server core, which it shares with a CLI and cloud agent product. The Roo Code team formally recommended Kilo in their migration post. Custom modes from Roo Code carry over to Kilo, and the team says most workflows transfer without changes.

Kilo has paid plans (Kilo Pass at $19/month, Teams at $15/user/month) in addition to a free tier that uses your own API keys.

Why this matters

Roo Code’s shutdown is a clean statement about where the AI coding tool market is heading, even if not every team agrees with it. The argument — that cloud agents will replace IDE copilots for most actual work — is the same bet that Devin, GitHub Copilot Workspace, and now Roomote are making.

The counter-argument is that developers still spend most of their time in their editors, and that tools like Cursor, Kilo, and Cline are improving fast enough to handle increasingly complex tasks locally. The IDE isn’t obviously dying.

What’s clear is that Roo Code’s team looked at both paths and made a choice. They had 3 million users and a 24K-star open-source project, and they walked away from it.

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