Day 19 of 100 Days Agentic Engineer Challenge: Free Roo Cline and 50 free messages with Claude Sonnet 3.5

Why pay for services like Cursor, V0, Bolt, Lovable or Codev when there is free autonomous encoding agent Roo-Cline that works with 50 messages with Claude Sonnet 3.5 for free! But how is it possible that Claude Sonnet is free? Roo Cline adds the possibility to connect to the model through the Github Copilot VSCode extension. Let’s quickly review my daily tasks routine and we’ll continue with Roo Cline.

Daily Tasks Routine

1. Physical activity — 25 pushups.
2.Seven hours of sleep — done.
3.AI Agents — Currently coding agents to use later to build another agent.
4.PAIC: in queue
5.Data Science: in queue

If you want to know what all these tasks are about, read the introduction to the 100 Days Agentic Engineer Challenge.

Roo Cline and Claude Sonnet 3.5

Roo-Cline is a fork of Cline, and with the latest update, offers connectivity to Copilot models. GitHub Copilot is now available for free with 50 daily messages and preview access to GPT-4o and Sonnet 3.5, and with Copilot’s Pro plan for $10/month you get unlimited messages and access to Sonnet 3.5, OpenAI GPT 4.0 and o1.

Roo-Cline has 3 agent modes:
- Code
- Architect
- Ask

You can verify that your application description is correct, pass it to the Architect to plan development, and confirm implementation with the Coding Agent.

Of course, it would be great if we could use Sonnet 3.5 with unlimited messaging for only $10 per month. Unfortunately there are limits, and after an hour of using it I got a ‘rate limit exceeded’ error. I’m trying to slow down the code generation, but at the moment it’s not working very well, maybe I’ll switch directly to the Anthropic API at some point to avoid breaks. At the moment there is no perfect free or low-cost solution of an autonomous coding agent, or I know nothing about it.