Kilo CLI 1.0: The Terminal-Native Future of Agentic Engineering

Kilo CLI 1.0: Built for Kilo Speed

TLDR: Kilo released CLI version 1.0, a production-ready terminal interface for agentic engineering that's open-source, supports 500+ models, and integrates seamlessly with VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. It's built on OpenCode, an MIT-licensed foundation, reflecting the company's bet on open, modular, portable AI development tools.

Summary:

Kilo has just shipped a major milestone with CLI 1.0, representing a fundamental shift in how agentic engineering tools should work. For the past year, the team has been building what they call "the best VS Code extension for agentic engineering" with a million downloads, but they've learned a critical lesson: developers don't live in one tool. They move between IDEs, terminals, remote servers, and mobile devices. A year of watching developers work has taught them that the best tools are portable and meet engineers where they are.

The motivation for rebuilding the CLI from scratch is particularly interesting. The original version was thinly layered on top of the VS Code extension architecture, which meant it inherited dependencies that slowed iteration and didn't feel native to the terminal environment. Kilo recognized that terminal-native tools deserve terminal-native foundations. Rather than try to squeeze their IDE experience into a CLI wrapper, they made a deliberate architectural choice: rebuild on OpenCode, an open-source MIT-licensed CLI for agentic coding that's beautifully designed and actively maintained by the community. This foundation allowed Kilo to integrate deeply with their platform while preserving everything that made OpenCode exceptional.

What makes Kilo CLI 1.0 particularly powerful is its radical model-agnosticism. Instead of locking developers into a single model provider, Kilo has built a platform that gives access to 500+ models. Developers can now choose the right tradeoffs for cost, latency, context window, and reasoning capabilities on a per-task basis. This is a contrarian bet in a market where many AI tools are consolidating into vertically integrated, closed systems. While others are building walled gardens, Kilo is betting that agentic engineering will be defined by open, modular, and portable tools. This philosophy isn't just talk—they're contributing improvements back upstream to OpenCode and basing their entire product on MIT-licensed open-source foundations.

For practical use, developers can start a coding session in the CLI while SSHed into a remote server, check it out in VS Code when they're back at their desk, share it via Slack with teammates, get an AI code review, and deploy through Cloud Agents—all without leaving their workflow. Settings and sessions sync automatically across interfaces, so you pick up where you left off regardless of which tool you're using. For engineering teams and architects, this creates interesting opportunities: the ability to standardize on agentic tools that aren't locked to a specific IDE or model provider means teams can evolve their tooling without disrupting developer workflows or requiring expensive migrations.

To lower the barrier to entry, Kilo is offering MiniMax M2.1 completely free for the launch week. MiniMax has become reliable for everyday coding tasks thanks to its excellent function calling, tool choice, and structured outputs support. This was also MiniMax's launch partner for Kilo for Slack, which suggests a tight integration story across communication and development tools.

Key takeaways:

• Kilo CLI 1.0 is open-source, built on MIT-licensed OpenCode, and designed to work across multiple interfaces—terminal, IDE, mobile, remote servers
• The platform supports 500+ models with the flexibility to choose different models for different tasks based on cost, latency, and reasoning needs
• Model-agnosticism is intentional: instead of vendor lock-in, developers maintain control and flexibility across their entire agentic workflow
• The tool reflects a growing belief that as AI becomes central to development, tools must be open, modular, and portable by default
• Installation is trivial: npm install -g @kilocode/cli, and it detects repositories automatically

Tradeoffs:

• Gain flexibility across 500+ models and multiple interfaces but sacrifice the optimization benefits of a single-vendor stack
• Gain true open-source transparency and community contribution but sacrifice the controlled roadmap and polished UX of vertically integrated competitors
• Gain seamless session sharing across CLI, IDE, and Slack but sacrifice some depth of integration within any single interface

Link: Kilo CLI 1.0: Built for Kilo Speed