Announcements

Cline 3.48.0: Skills and websearch make Cline smarter

Juan Pablo Flores

09 Jan 2026 — 3 min read

Cline 3.48.0 adds Skills compatibility. If you've already built Skills, you can now use them in Cline. This release also adds websearch tooling through the Cline provider, giving Cline access to real-time information when you need it.

Skills

Think about how you'd onboard a new team member. You wouldn't dump every document on them at once. You'd give them an overview, then point them to detailed guides when they're actually working on specific tasks.

Skills work the same way. Each skill is a directory containing a `SKILL.md` file with metadata and instructions. When you start a conversation, Cline sees only the skill name and description. When your request matches what a skill does, Cline loads the full instructions. This progressive loading means you can package extensive domain knowledge without burning context tokens on information that isn't relevant to the current task.

Unlike rules, which are always active, Skills load on-demand. You can install dozens of skills and they won't affect context or performance until Cline actually needs them.

my-skill/
├── SKILL.md # Required: main instructions
├── docs/ # Optional: additional documentation
└── scripts/ # Optional: utility scripts

The SKILL.md file has two parts: YAML frontmatter with metadata, and the actual instructions:

---
name: my-skill
description: Brief description of what this skill does and when to use it.
---

# My Skill

Detailed instructions for Cline to follow when this skill is activated.

The description is critical because it determines when Cline activates the skill. Be specific about what the skill does and when it should be used.

Skills can live in two places. Global skills go in ~/.cline/skills/ (or C:\Users\USERNAME\.cline\skills\ on Windows) and apply to all your projects. Project skills go in .cline/skills/ within your workspace. When a global and project skill share the same name, the global skill takes precedence.

Some ideas for skills:

Release management workflows
Code review checklists, database migration procedures
API integration patterns
Debugging workflows for specific frameworks
Infrastructure provisioning with your preferred cloud setup.

The best skills encode institutional knowledge that would otherwise live only in experienced developers' heads.

To enable Skills, head to Settings, then Features, then toggle on Enable Skills. You'll find a new Skills tab in the rules and workflows panel where you can view, toggle, create, and delete skills.

Find all the details about Skills in the Cline documentation.

Websearch tooling

Cline provider users now have access to websearch and web fetch tools. These let Cline search the web and retrieve page content directly as text.

If you've used Cline's browser tool before, you know it works by launching a headless browser, taking screenshots, and interpreting what it sees visually. That's useful for debugging your own applications or interacting with web interfaces. But when Cline just needs to look something up, launching a browser and parsing screenshots is slow and context-heavy.

The new websearch tools solve this. When Cline needs to check the latest documentation, look up an API reference, or find current information, it can search and fetch that content as clean text. No browser launch, no screenshots, no visual interpretation overhead. The result: faster lookups, less context consumption, and more reliable information retrieval.

This pairs well with Skills. Skills give Cline domain expertise you've codified; websearch gives Cline access to information that changes over time. Together, you get an agent that knows your workflows and can stay current with the outside world.

To use websearch, you need to be on the Cline provider with credits in your account. The tools are available automatically when Cline determines it needs external information.

Other improvements

This release includes Gemini thinking support and adds Katcoder to the model list. Cerebras users get access to zai-glm-4.7. The Vercel AI Gateway provider received model refresh capabilities and improved reasoning support.

We also fixed a regression from the previous release that affected the diff view and document truncation, and resolved an extension crash that occurred when using the context menu selector.