Two popular AI coding tools are already dead

If you are choosing an AI coding tool, the question you are asking is usually which is best?

There is a more useful question: will it still exist in two years?

Here is what the record says.

Gone, and gone quietly

Roo Code — a well-known fork of Cline, with tens of thousands of users — is archived. The repository is public and frozen. It is not coming back.

Sourcegraph Cody — a serious product from a funded company — returns 404. The repository does not exist at its old address any more.

Neither announcement would have reached most users. Tools do not die in a press release; they stop being updated, and people find out when something breaks.

Slowing down

Two more, still here but no longer moving fast:

Aider — the cleanest git-native agent in the field — has an Apache-2.0 licence and a last commit months behind. Not abandoned. Not moving.

The Stable Diffusion web UI — 165,000 stars, and the interface most image-generation tutorials still point at — has been roughly six months without a commit. ComfyUI overtook it while it stood still.

Why this category dies faster than others

The underlying models change monthly. A harness that handles context well today may be wasting it tomorrow, and keeping up is continuous work.

It is a thin layer. A harness is a few thousand lines wrapped around someone else's API. When the API changes — and it does — the harness must change too.

The work is unpaid. Most of these are open-source projects maintained by one or two people. When they get a job, the project stops. That is not a failure of character; it is the normal life cycle of the software we all depend on.

The commercial ones are subsidiaries. A free tool built to sell a subscription can be shut off the moment it stops serving that purpose.

How to choose without regretting it

One criterion does most of the work:

Pick a tool that lets you bring your own model, and keeps your work in files you control.

That rules out very little. It also means that when the tool dies — and on this record, it will — you keep your repository, your git history, and your ability to point something else at the same task.

The alternative, a tool that holds your workflow in its own format and its own cloud, is fine right up until the day it is not.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

Every tool on this list was, at its peak, the answer to "which one should I use?"

Most of these will not exist in two years. Plan for that rather than being surprised by it.