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 AI capabilities into every fragment of the professional software workflow.By launching a model-agnostic CLI on the heels of its Slack bot, Kilo is making a calculated bet: the future of AI development isn’t about a single interface, but about tools that travel with the engineer between IDEs, terminals, remote servers, and team chat threads. In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Kilo CEO and co-founder Scott Breitenother explained the necessity of this fluidity: “This experience just feels a little bit too fragmented right now… as an engineer, sometimes I’m going to use the CLI, sometimes I’m going to be in VS Code, and sometimes I’m going to be kicking off an agent from Slack, and folks shouldn’t have to be jumping around.” He noted that Kilo CLI 1.0 is specifically “built for this world… for the developer who moves between their local IDE, a remote server via SSH, and a terminal session at 2 a.m. to fix a production bug.”Technology: Rebuilding for ‘Kilo Speed’Kilo CLI 1.0 is a fundamental architectural shift. While 2025 was the year senior engineers began to take AI vibe coding seriously, Kilo believes 2026 will be defined by the adoption of agents that can manage end-to-end tasks independently. The …
