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Home Blog Kilo Code Joined Anaconda: What AI Builders Should Know

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Kilo Code Joined Anaconda: What AI Builders Should Know

By Dawn Wages

July 15, 2026

Kilo Code, also known as “Kilo,” is an open source, model-agnostic, coding agent that lets you write faster, better software using your favorite IDE or the command line. If you’ve spent any time in VS Code, JetBrains or your terminal writing AI-assisted code over the past year, there’s a decent chance that Kilo has come across your desk and you’ve tried it out. You may be one of the millions of developers who have integrated it into your workflow. It is the most-used client on OpenRouter, it’s open source, and it doesn’t lock you into one model provider or charge a fee as your cloud middleman.<br>This post will explain why I am so excited about what happens when Kilo, a tool I’ve already been using, connects with the Anaconda ecosystem, how the Kilo approach fits with the way that Anaconda is approaching developer experience, and what this means for how you build today and six months from now. I’m just as excited to welcome the Kilo community to the Anaconda family.<br>Acquisition announcements usually come from the top: Read the official announcement from David DeSanto (Anaconda CEO) and Scott Breitenother (Kilo CEO) to understand the enterprise case for why this matters: AI at enterprise scale needs to be fast, capable, governed, and trusted, and spend visibility is a big part of getting there.. This post, however, is the developer-focused point of view on why I and millions of developers have chosen Kilo regardless of what company we work for.<br>What Kilo Code actually is<br>If you’re arriving fashionably late to the party, I’ll run down what Kilo is and how you can leverage it today.<br>Kilo Code started in early 2025, co-founded by Scott Breitenother, Emilie Schario, and Sid Sijbrandij (GitLab’s former CEO). It grew fast, being genuinely useful, and it doesn’t make you bet on one AI vendor or another before you get value from it. That’s exactly how I first heard about it: word of mouth from my peers.<br>A few things that matter to me in regards to how I pick my toolchain and play into my excitement around this acquisition:<br>It’s open source and MIT-licensed . You can read exactly what it does, fork it, and audit its behavior. It aligns with Anaconda’s history and our open core future.<br>It’s made for builders and lives where you build. Whether you’re reaching for VS Code, JetBrains or your CLI—installable via npm, curl, pnpm, bun, Homebrew, AUR/paru covering major package managers across macOS, Linux and cross-platform tooling—you can continue building within the developer context you prefer.<br>500+ models, and you pay the provider’s rate; or go local in your IDE. No markup, no lock-in, no “cloud middleman” fee, and you can switch models mid-task. For example, you can use a fast, cheap model for boilerplate code and a heavier reasoning model for the gnarly parts within the same session.<br>Local-first crowd has an answer. If you’re also interested in coding first with models running locally and then expanding to cloud models when you need more compute, Kilo supports this fully in IDE, with more limited support in the CLI today. This matters if you care about keeping code and data on your machine, working offline or just tinkering with local inference the way I do on my own home lab setup.<br>Agent modes FTW. The first thing I explored was the hotly anticipated agent modes when I installed Kilo to my IDE. If you use Architect Mode for planning before you write a line, then Debug Mode for tracing down what broke, you’re pushing the limits beyond what most code assistants will do for you.<br>KiloClaw extends the agentic tooling. A hosted, always-on agent you can reach through other communication vectors like Telegram, Discord, or Slack that keeps working after you’ve closed your laptop, for scheduled jobs and longer-running tasks. No more keeping your laptop propped open as you move about on the fly.<br>If you’re already using conda environments, Anaconda’s packaging ecosystem, or the broader Anaconda Platform, the direction here only enhances your workflow: Kilo is a builder-focused tool to reach for first that connects to the infrastructure you already trust.<br>These features do not change because of an acquisition. In fact, we’re saying plainly that what you love about Kilo is what we love about Kilo and you can continue to depend on the way it delivers efficiency for you.<br>Sensible defaults, Kilo Code, and conda<br>Kilo’s agents start with no permissions and earn access incrementally, the same instinct that’s kept conda environments useful for over a decade. You don’t...