I’ve recommended Kilo Code as a migration target more than once without ever actually writing it up on its own. That’s worth correcting, especially since two things changed since those recommendations that they never mentioned.
What it actually is: free and open source, BYOK, shipping as a VS Code extension, a JetBrains plugin, and a standalone CLI — genuinely equal support across all three rather than one primary surface with the others as an afterthought, which was specifically what made it worth recommending to people who lost Continue.dev’s cross-editor combo. Current versions: VS Code and CLI at v7.7.7 as of September 22, JetBrains stable at v7.1.6.
The acquisition worth knowing about: Anaconda bought Kilo Code in July 2026. Anaconda is best known for Python data science tooling — conda, its package distribution, Jupyter-adjacent infrastructure — a genuinely different center of gravity than a venture-backed AI startup or one of the frontier labs. Nothing about the open-source license or BYOK model changed as a result, but it’s worth knowing whose priorities now sit upstream of the roadmap, especially if you’re specifically drawn to Kilo Code’s neutrality on model choice.
The detail those alternatives posts skipped entirely: Kilo’s CLI is a fork of OpenCode — the actual most-starred open-source coding agent I’ve pointed to elsewhere on this site — and as of this writing it’s tracking upstream OpenCode releases from about five weeks behind, currently caught up through OpenCode v1.18.18. That’s not a criticism on its own; every fork runs some lag behind whatever it’s built on, and I’ve written about why forking is such a common pattern in this space without spending much time on what happens after the fork, once it has to keep pace with a moving upstream. But it is a real, practical tradeoff worth naming plainly: if a security fix or a major feature lands in OpenCode this week, Kilo’s CLI users are looking at roughly a month’s wait before it’s merged down, tested, and shipped in their version.
Recent changelog activity confirms it’s still an actively maintained fork rather than a stalled one — v7.7.3 removed the KiloClaw feature and consolidated the /local-review command into a plain /review alias, ordinary maintenance-and-cleanup work rather than the kind of silence that precedes an abandoned project going quiet.
The honest recommendation, now that I’ve actually looked at it directly instead of just pointing people toward it in passing: still a solid pick if genuinely equal VS Code and JetBrains support matters more to you than anything else, still real BYOK freedom, still open source. Just go in knowing the CLI specifically is running behind the project it’s built on, and that “Anaconda-owned” is a different kind of backing than most of what else gets covered on this site — worth factoring in if a startup’s incentives versus an established company’s feel meaningfully different to you.
