Kilo CLI 1.0 brings open source vibe coding to your terminal with support for 500+ models

Remote-first AI coding startup Kilo doesn't think software developers should have to pledge their undying allegiance to any one development environment — and certainly not any one model or harness.

This week, the startup — backed by GitLab co-founder Sid Sijbrandij — unveiled Kilo CLI 1.0, a complete rebuild of its command-line tool that offers support for more than 500 different underlying AI models from proprietary leaders and open source rivals like Alibaba's Qwen.

It comes just weeks after Kilo launched a Slackbot allowing developers to ship code directly from Salesforce's popular messaging service (Slack, which VentureBeat also uses) powered by the Chinese AI startup MiniMax.

The release marks a strategic pivot away from the IDE-centric “sidebar” model popularized by industry giants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, or dedicated apps like the new OpenAI Codex, and even terminal-based rivals like Codex CLI and Claude Code, aiming instead to embed ...