Roo Code

Short answer: Roo Code was archived on 2026-05-15 at v3.54.0. It still installs, it still runs, and it will never receive another fix — including a security one. If you are using it as you read this, nothing broke today. You just have a deadline you did not know about, and you get to pick when to act on it rather than finding out when something breaks.

This is worth saying plainly because a lot of people are still on it. The Marketplace listing shows 1,881,205 installs, and the project was still moving billions of tokens a day through OpenRouter in late July 2026. It is not a dead project nobody uses. It is a dead project a great many people are still using, most of whom have not been told.

What "archived" actually means

The facts, as read on 2026-07-31. The RooCodeInc/Roo-Code repository is flagged archived by the GitHub API. Its last push was 2026-05-15 at 18:08 UTC. The final release is v3.54.0, published seventeen minutes earlier the same afternoon. It sits at 24,364 stars and 3,390 forks, with 1,036 issues frozen open, under Apache-2.0.

The README carries the notice, under a heading titled Disclaimer:

The Roo Code Extension was shut down on May 15th.

An archived GitHub repository is read-only: no new issues, no new pull requests, nothing to merge. The practical consequences split cleanly.

What does not change: the extension is still published. The Marketplace listing for RooVeterinaryInc.roo-cline is live at v3.54.0, last updated 2026-05-15, and still installable on a fresh machine. Your existing install keeps working. The code is Apache-2.0, so anyone can fork it — and someone has.

What does change is subtler than "it stops working," which is why it is easy to miss. Two things decay:

• Security. An agent extension reads your repository, holds your provider keys, and executes commands. A vulnerability found in that code after 2026-05-15 has nobody to fix it. The README's disclaimer lists "cyber vulnerabilities or attacks" among the risks you assume — boilerplate while the project was staffed, not boilerplate now.
• Model support. Provider integrations are code. A new provider, a changed auth flow, a model with different parameter handling — each needed a release, and there will not be one. Roo Code's view of the model landscape is frozen at 2026-05-15.

What Roo Code was

Worth recording, because why people liked it decides which replacement suits them.

Roo Code was a VS Code extension under Apache-2.0. It began as a fork of Cline — the README says so directly, describing Cline as the project "from where Roo Code originated," and the extension ID never lost the evidence: it is roo-cline to this day.

Two things distinguished it. The first was modes: Code, Architect, Ask, Debug, and custom ones you defined, each with its own role definition and tool permissions. Instead of one assistant with one personality, you switched posture, and the posture constrained what the model could touch.

The second was Boomerang Tasks, driven by the Orchestrator mode — subagent orchestration inside a VS Code extension, at a time when that was mostly a terminal-agent idea. The documentation describes the mechanism:

Each subtask runs in its own context, often using a different Roo Code mode tailored for that specific job

The orchestrator delegated through a new_task tool, the parent paused, the child ran with a fresh history that inherited nothing automatically, and only a summary came back up. Orchestrator mode deliberately had no file access, no MCP calls and no command execution — the docs frame that narrowness as the point, keeping the coordinator out of implementation detail.

That design has aged well. It is close to how subagents work in Claude Code, and Roo shipped it — with a visible parent-and-child task tree in the sidebar — earlier than most. If Boomerang is why you are still on Roo Code, that narrows your options below.

Why it stopped, and where the team went

The clearest evidence is the domain. As of 2026-07-31, roocode.com issues a 301 redirect to roomote.dev. The team did not walk away from the space; they changed what they were building.

Roomote bills itself as "the cloud coding agent you actually own," under the byline "By the creators of" Roo Code. It is a different product in almost every dimension: a web application rather than an editor extension, driven mainly from Slack, Teams, Discord or Telegram, that works in your repository and returns pull requests. It sells as Roomote Cloud from $49/month, or self-hosted via Docker. The licence is Fair Core License v1.0, source-available, with Apache-2.0 granted at each release's second anniversary — a real change from Roo Code's plain Apache-2.0, worth checking before assuming the successor carries the same freedoms.

The pivot is corroborated from a second direction. The community fork's README puts it this way:

Zoo Code continues development of this project after the Roo team wound down active Roo Code work to focus on Roomote. Thank you to the Roo team for everything they built.

Roo Code, Inc. still exists as an entity — the archived README directs former paying customers to a billing address for account questions. This was a wind-down, not a disappearance.

The three places to go

Roo Code's own README names two destinations, and names them in this order:

If you're looking for an alternative, check out ZooCode (a fork started by the Roo Code community) and Cline (from where Roo Code originated).

Kilo Code is a third, larger in install terms, though the Roo maintainers did not name it. Figures below read from the GitHub and Marketplace APIs on 2026-07-31.

Zoo Code is the drop-in. The same codebase continued: repository created 2026-04-23, Apache-2.0, carrying Roo's version numbering forward from 3.54.0 — v3.68.0 on 2026-07-11, v3.70.0 on 2026-07-18, v3.72.0 on 2026-07-25, roughly weekly, adding models that postdate Roo's freeze. Modes and Boomerang work because they are literally the same implementation. The honest caveat is scale: 1,471 stars and 62,917 installs against Roo's 1.88 million, from a team three months old. Trading a maintained-by-nobody project for a maintained-by-few one is better, but it is not the same as safe.

Kilo Code is the biggest move that isn't a fork of Roo. MIT, spanning VS Code, JetBrains and a CLI, with an importer for Roo users built into the extension. It kept a comparable mode vocabulary — Ask, Architect, Code, Debug and custom — so the mental model survives the move. Its CLI is a fork of OpenCode rather than of Roo, which is why the terminal experience feels unlike anything Roo had. We cover it in the Kilo Code guide.

Cline is going home. Apache-2.0, the widest surface area of the three, by far the most installed. The temperament differs in a way worth anticipating: Cline is built around reviewing each diff before it lands, where Roo leaned on modes and delegation to set how much you watched. That is an adjustment rather than a downgrade, and we walk through it in Claude Code vs Cline.

The short version: if Boomerang and your custom modes are why you stayed, Zoo Code is least disruptive. If you want a bigger project and will spend an afternoon, Kilo Code. If you want the largest, oldest codebase in this lineage and are relaxed about changing how you work, Cline.

What transfers, and what doesn't

Back up Roo Code's global storage directory before you uninstall anything. Both automated migration paths read from it, and uninstalling is the point at which people lose their custom modes.

To Zoo Code, the least is required, because the formats are unchanged — same config files, same modes, same task structure. Zoo publishes a Roo-to-Zoo migration guide. Budget minutes, and expect to re-enter provider credentials, which are stored per-extension.

To Kilo Code, there is a real importer rather than a marketing gesture — the extension source contains a Roo migration handler that detects installs under the old rooveterinaryinc and roovscode extension IDs and carries over sessions, MCP servers, custom modes, the default model and settings. Kilo's migration page states the file mappings:

Your .roorules become AGENTS.md. Your .roomodes become .kilocodemodes. Your MCP config slots right in.

So .roorules maps to AGENTS.md, .roomodes to .kilocodemodes, and .roo/mcp.json to .kilocode/mcp.json. The page does not address API keys — plan to re-enter them — and makes no claim either way about conversation history, though the importer source includes a session migrator. Verify yours before deleting anything.

To Cline, assume manual work. There is no advertised Roo importer, and modes are Roo's concept rather than Cline's, so custom mode definitions are the piece with no direct destination — you will re-express them as rules and instructions. MCP servers are the easy part, since MCP config is a shared standard and re-pointing it is mechanical. A dozen finely-tuned custom modes is what makes this the migration that costs an afternoon.

One thing transfers everywhere, and people forget to count it: your prompts, your project rules, and your sense of which tasks to hand over. None of that was in the extension.

Sources

Archive status, final release date, star and fork counts read from the GitHub API on 2026-07-31; extension versions and install counts from the VS Code Marketplace API, and the roocode.com redirect to roomote.dev, verified the same day. Counts and versions move; the archive date does not.

• RooCodeInc/Roo-Code (archived) · final release v3.54.0 · Roo Code documentation · Boomerang Tasks
• Roo Code on the VS Code Marketplace · roomote.dev
• Zoo-Code-Org/Zoo-Code · Roo to Zoo migration guide
• Kilo-Org/kilocode · Kilo — Roo migration · cline.bot
• OpenRouter — coding app usage. Note this ranks only applications that opt into usage tracking, and misses anything running on a direct provider key or a subscription, so treat it as a floor rather than a measurement.

Not affiliated with Roo Code, Inc., Zoo Code, Kilo or Cline. If something here is wrong or has gone stale, tell us and we'll fix it.