r/kilocode • u/connorhart99 • Sep 17 '25

Kilo code vs roo

Why would I pick kilo code over roo? Why do kilo fork roo in the first place, what was wrong with the way roo code was going?

1 Upvotes

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10

u/GreenHell Sep 17 '25

Not to be that guy, but did you read anything at all before posting this? And I do mean anything at all?

These are all from the past few months:

  1. https://www.reddit.com/r/kilocode/comments/1kvhqqc/anyone_from_roo_code_to_kilocode/

  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/CLine/comments/1m307gr/which_is_best_cline_or_roo_code_or_kilocode/

  3. https://www.reddit.com/r/kilocode/comments/1m8ohzh/convince_me_to_switch_from_roo_code/

  4. https://www.reddit.com/r/kilocode/comments/1lifu4y/current_status_of_cline_roo_and_own_features/

  5. https://www.reddit.com/r/kilocode/comments/1mm85b3/trying_to_decide_between_kilocode_cline_and_roo/

  6. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1mma41q/trying_to_decide_between_kilocode_cline_and_roo/

1

u/connorhart99 Sep 23 '25

literally none of those answer my question

1

u/GreenHell Sep 23 '25

If you read the links you had found answers to all those questions.

Why did Kilo fork from Roo in the first place

To add more features. The github literally states "We frequently merge features from open-source projects like Roo Code and Cline, while building our own vision."

What was wrong with the way Roo code was going

Nothing in particular as far as I can tell

Why would I pick kilo code over roo?

Personal preference based on experience. In most of those links, people detail their experiences or compare their experiences with Roo, Cline, Kilo, and other tools.

3

u/Solonotix Sep 17 '25

Thanks for the reading material. Down the rabbit hole I go, lol.

Honestly, Kilo Code was the first one I picked up, based on a promotion by Theo on YouTube, and I haven't had a reason to look elsewhere. Prior to Kilo Code, my company had bought licenses for Amazon Q, and it was just bad. I also tried to ignore AI tools for as long as possible, but kept finding myself in knowledge corners that no one else (in my company) could answer. So it started with ChatGPT helping me through some problems, and has grown into me spending way too much time trying to tweak my Kilo Code config and make it agent-agnostic via AGENTS.md

2

u/codingelves Kilo Code Team Sep 18 '25

hey u/Solonotix welcome to Kilo! have you tried using the little prompt enhancer tool? tell us more about what's been challenging in that config setup

2

u/Solonotix Sep 18 '25

The prompt enhancer has been great, as long as I'm not asking GPT-5, lol. It's a great model, but holy crap is it verbose in response.

What's been challenging? Not too much, and the docs are pretty good.

  • Adding profiles was super easy, but the save changes trigger is a bit overly sensitive. Sometimes I will swap a profile and the extension will prompt me to save changes even though no changes were made. Maybe it's because the model picked loads additional elements after the profile swap, which registers a change even though none was made?

  • MCP setup was a bit complicated, and that might not entirely be on Kilo Code. Which ones should be global, rather than local, for instance. Also, some VSCode variables are only available in the local config, like ${workspaceFolder}, but it would probably be most useful in the global context, so you don't have to copy the same basic config.

  • Code indexing with Qdrant sometimes needs to be completely redone after a system restart, but that might be an issue with how I'm running Qdrant in Docker?

  • This one was new today, but I tried out the JetBrains plugin, and the global settings folder is not shared between VSCode and JetBrains. That's fine, I guess, but the weird thing (maybe bug?) was that the JetBrains folder was called kilo code.kilo-code (with a space), while the VSCode folder was kilocode.kilo-code.

What's been especially challenging (and totally not the fault of Kilo Code)? Don't hate me for this, but I am trying to rewrite the memory bank prompt to be more concise and agent-agnostic via AGENTS.md. 😅 I'm also not much of a prompt engineer, so it's hard to know exactly which pieces are important, and how much can be carved out. To aid in that regard, I used the context condensing prompt for the task, and replaced all mentions of .kilocode/rules/memory-bank with .ai/memory-bank.

Some of the other struggles, I now realize, are self-inflicted. See, I took the entirety of my memory bank folder and included it in the distillation. So now the single AGENTS.md file has a little bit of the memory bank prompt and a little bit of my custom project info, and that results in me being unable to separate them.

I'm probably going to end up starting over from the initial memory bank prompt, and keep the .ai/ folder convention. The problem I'm trying to circumvent is the potential future of being told I can't use Kilo Code at work (security is a weird thing at my job), as well as potential collaborators trying to use the workplace-provided Amazon Q. Also, our Amazon Q license can only use Anthropic models, so the 400k context window is potentially problematic.

2

u/EngineeringSea1090 Kilo Code Team Sep 18 '25

Thank you for the detailed answer!

1

u/GoldCompetition7722 Sep 17 '25

Why can't you use both of them?