Cline 3.55: Arcee Trinity and Kimi K2.5 Now Available

TL;DR

• Cline 3.55 adds Arcee Trinity Large (free, US-built, Apache 2.0) and Kimi K2.5 (open-source, 1T params, matches Opus 4.5 on benchmarks)
• Trinity handles general coding tasks cost-free; K2.5 excels at visual coding and frontend work with multimodal support
• ChatGPT subscription support also lands — use GPT-5 models in Cline via OAuth, no API key needed

What Dropped

Cline 3.55 brings two open models that shift the calculus on proprietary APIs. Arcee Trinity Large is a 400B parameter mixture-of-experts model, free and Apache 2.0 licensed. Kimi K2.5 is a 1-trillion parameter open-source model that scores 50.2% on Humanity's Last Exam with tools—higher than GPT-5.2 and Opus 4.5.

The Dev Angle

Arcee Trinity Large runs with 13 billion active parameters at inference, giving you larger-model capabilities without the compute cost. It's US-built and trained on Nvidia Blackwell B300 hardware, which matters for enterprises with compliance requirements. MMLU Pro scores hit 82; GPQA Diamonds at 75. The 128K context window means you can feed substantial codebases without truncation. In Cline, it handles general coding, refactoring, and iterative development without API costs.

Kimi K2.5 is where visual coding gets interesting. Drop a screenshot into Cline and ask it to recreate the UI—K2.5 handles layout, interactions, and animations, then visually inspects its own rendered output and iterates without you pointing out errors. On SWE-bench Verified, it hits 76.8%, close to GPT-5.2's 80% and Opus 4.5's 80.9%. The model also supports agent swarm orchestration with up to 100 sub-agents and 1,500 parallel tool calls, useful for complex multi-step tasks.

ChatGPT subscription support also lands in this release. If you have ChatGPT Plus or Pro, you can now use GPT-5 models directly in Cline through OAuth—no API key, no per-token costs. It's a solid option if you're already paying for ChatGPT.

Should You Care?

If you're running Cline on a budget or hitting API costs with proprietary models, Arcee Trinity Large is a real alternative for general coding work. If you're building interfaces and want a model that understands visual output, K2.5 is worth testing—its multimodal capabilities and self-iteration on rendered code are genuinely useful for frontend work.

If you were using Grok Code Fast 1 or Devstral (both free promotions ended), Trinity is now your free tier option. If you're already paying for ChatGPT Plus, the OAuth integration removes friction—no separate API billing, just use what you're already subscribed to.

For enterprises with compliance requirements around model origin, Trinity's US-built status and Apache 2.0 license remove legal review friction that other open models create. This is the gap Arcee is explicitly filling as Meta pulls back on open releases and frontier models stay closed.

To get started: Open Cline settings, select the Cline provider, and choose your model. Cline 3.55 is available now in VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf marketplaces. Download Cline or read the docs.

Source: Cline