Summary
The operating model behind using Cline for repo work: repo questions, plan-edit-verify passes, broad-task discovery, and monitoring for tasks that start to sprawl.
Goal
The goal is to make a coding agent behave like a careful collaborator: inspect before editing, plan before broad changes, and verify after implementation. The agent should get narrower as it learns, not wider.
Workflows
Small explicit changes can go straight to implementation. Questions about a codebase use a read-only repo-question path. Multi-file work uses plan-edit-verify. Broad or vague requests start with discovery and stop at a phased plan.
That separation makes the workflow inspectable. The human can see whether the task is a one-file patch, a multi-file change, or an architecture pass before the agent starts cutting across the repo.
Budgeting
Long-context models can make broad tasks feel effortless until the context bill, latency, or quality drift shows up. The practical safeguard is a large-task budget: first inspect a small batch of relevant files, then split work into phases rather than carrying the entire repo forward.