Matt Rubens says Roo Code has reached 3 million installs—but the team is shutting the project down as it pivots to a Slack-based “cloud agent” called Roomote. The announcement lays out both an end-of-life timeline for the extension and the internal shift that convinced the team the IDE-centered workflow Roo Code was built around isn’t where it’s headed next.
Roo Code is being archived, with a final release set for May 15
Rubens said the Roo Code repo will be archived, and that the last extension release is planned for May 15. The team also plans to refund unused balances, and Rubens separately told a paying user that Pro payments had been refunded and that unused credit balances would be refunded soon.
Rubens also indicated existing users can continue to use Roo Code, but it will no longer receive updates. In replies, he suggested a community fork “may gain momentum,” and told one user, “Time for a new fork?”
From an IDE extension to cloud containers
Rubens traced Roo Code’s origin to late 2024, when it was created by forking Cline and adding a feature now widely known as “dangerously-skip-permissions.” He framed the early era of agentic coding as “rough and experimental,” but said Roo Code’s community and adoption grew quickly.
By Fall 2025, Rubens said the team’s internal workflow had moved beyond an IDE extension. Roo Code was being run “in cloud containers” to parallelize work and keep up with “hundreds of community PRs and issues,” operating headlessly with “full auto-approve enabled,” opening fixes, running the app, and verifying its own work before requesting human attention.
He summarized the goal as “Prompt in → high-quality PR out,” arguing that once a single prompt can produce a good PR, the interaction model changes and the IDE becomes less central.
Roomote: a paid Slack service for teams
Rubens positioned the new product, Roomote, as the successor to that containerized workflow. He said Roomote “lives in Slack,” integrates with tools including Linear, GitHub, and Sentry, and can run “whichever frontier model fits the job.” He added that it verifies its work “with screenshots and a full local environment,” and framed it as something that can produce PRs end-to-end for roles beyond engineering, including PMs, support, ops, marketers, and founders.
In a reply about pricing and requirements, Rubens confirmed Roomote is a paid service intended for teams who already use Slack.
User reaction: disappointment, skepticism, and calls for forks
The thread includes a mix of congratulations and frustration. Several users said they were disappointed to see Roo Code end after investing time in workflows, and one raised concerns about teams that don’t use Slack or have specific security requirements. Rubens responded that it’s “hard to try to be everything to everyone,” and said the team is focusing on what’s working well internally.