#thinslice vs Devin

Devin is Cognition's cloud-hosted autonomous engineer. It runs on Cognition's servers with Devin's own agent. You cannot swap the agent, and access is gated by a usage quota.

thinslice is a CLI that binds each git worktree to its own bag of runtime state — dedicated Postgres, Redis, ports, and config. It runs as native processes on your machine, with any agent you choose, for free. macOS, Linux, and Windows.

#Your machine, your agent

Devin bundles the environment and the agent. The environment lives on Cognition's servers, and the agent is Devin. You get one agent and one place for it to run.

thinslice runs on your laptop as native processes. There is no Docker and no VM. A cold start is a process fork, so it is near instant. Because everything runs locally, thinslice works offline.

thinslice is also agent-agnostic. It sets environment variables — a database URL, a port, a config path — that any CLI agent reads. You pick the model and the agent: Claude Code, Codex, or another tool. thinslice runs the official CLI as a subprocess with your own credentials. It never extracts tokens and never proxies model calls.

#No meter, no quota

Devin sells subscription tiers gated by usage quota: Free, Pro ($20/mo), and Max ($200/mo), with Teams and Enterprise above them (as of August 2026). The tiers name the quota only in relative terms — a "light quota" on Free, "increased quotas" on Pro, "significantly higher quotas" on Max. What a run draws against that quota is not something you can read off the page before you buy.

thinslice is free, and the source is available under a community license. There is no subscription, no quota, and no metered compute. Run one worktree or twenty against your own hardware. "Let the agent try something" is not a cost decision.

#Inspect the state yourself

Devin's execution environment is opaque. You cannot open a psql session against the database that the agent is using. You see the agent's summary of what happened, not the raw state.

With thinslice, the state bag is a plain named directory. You cd into it, run pg_dump, run rsync, or open it with any file tool. You can psql into the agent's database while the agent is still working. When something goes wrong, you read the real rows instead of a summary.

#CLI

thinslice is a CLI first:

# Create a worktree with its own db, redis, and ports
slice new feature/add-search

# Spawn a throwaway worktree cloned from the current slice, hand it to Claude Code
slice tmp --from current claude -p "add full-text search to the products table"

# List all slices and their state
slice ls

# Attach to an existing slice
slice attach feature/add-search

slice tmp --from current clones the current state bag into a fresh worktree, so the agent starts with real data and a working dev environment. When the agent exits, thinslice discards the throwaway. You can hand it to any agent.

Devin has no local CLI that you script this way.

#Change the tool itself

thinslice ships as a collection of shell scripts. The files that run are the files you installed. There is no compiled binary and no build step between you and the tool.

If you want a command to work differently, ask your coding agent to edit the installed scripts. The change is live on the next run. Most tools stop you at this point: fork the repository, install the toolchain, build, and then test. thinslice also includes a built-in path to send your change upstream.

Devin is a hosted service. You cannot change how it works.

#Platforms

thinslice runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Devin runs in Cognition's cloud, and you reach it through a browser or its integrations.

#Comparison