Blog
clines 7.0 — measuring change, not commits
Bots are behind 73.9% of hotspot commits, so the change signal was mostly measuring CI. Dropping them, following renames, weighting recent changes higher — plus two new commands: change coupling, and a rating for what is safe to hand to an AI agent.
clines 6.0 — the machine-readable release
--json on every command, threshold flags that exit 2 so a
pipeline can tell a finding from a failure, a --diff mode that scopes any
analysis to a pull request, an MCP server that adds no dependency — and the discovery that
a shallow CI checkout had been making two commands quietly wrong.
From 5.4.0 to 5.7.0
clines refactor, which joins complexity to git history to say which files are
worth the work; a bug where clines measured its own HTML reports; and dropping 95.7% of
the install by replacing zod with 130 lines.
5.0.0: auditing our own output
Pointing clines' own question at clines: 304,216 wasted regex compilations, every file classified twice, and output that did not fit an 80-column terminal. Includes the upgrade path from 3.11.1.
What changed in clines 4.x
Source-only reporting by default, the working-set reframing of token cost, navigability, and comment drift. Includes both breaking changes and how to upgrade.
From 2.0.2 to 3.11.1
The TypeScript rewrite, the move to subcommands, and the three analyses added on top of counting: duplication, complexity and token cost.