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InfoQ Homepage News The Void IDE, Open-Source Alternative to Cursor,
Released in Beta

Development

The Void IDE, Open-Source Alternative to Cursor, Released in Beta

Jun 21, 2025 1 min read

by

  *  Bruno Couriol

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A new open-source AI-powered code editor, Void IDE, was recently
released in beta, positioning itself as a privacy-focused and free
alternative to popular closed-source AI editors like Cursor and
GitHub Copilot. Backed by Y Combinator, Void IDE is a fork of Visual
Studio Code. While Microsoft recently announced plans to open Source
its GitHub Copilot Chat Extension possibly in a few months, the beta
release is available now for the community to fiddle with.

The primary motivation behind Void IDE is to address concerns
surrounding the privacy and cost associated with proprietary AI
coding tools. Closed-source editors may require sending private code
data through their backends, raising privacy issues and leading to
ongoing subscription costs. While the backend may often keep only
embeddings computed from the code, the original code may sometimes be
recoverable. As the authors of the paper Mitigating Privacy Risks in
LLM Embeddings from Embedding Inversion explain:

    The surge in popularity of embedding vector databases in LLMs has
    been accompanied by significant concerns about privacy leakage.
    Embedding vector databases are particularly vulnerable to
    embedding inversion attacks, where adversaries can exploit the
    embeddings to reverse-engineer and extract sensitive information
    from the original text data.

Void IDE aims to provide options for keeping developers in control of
their data. Void IDE can leverage various Large Language Models
(LLMs), supporting direct integrations with services like Claude,
GPT, and Gemini, as well as local model hosting via Ollama. This
ensures that AI processing can happen locally or via direct API
calls, avoiding a third-party middleman.

Void IDE offers a range of AI-centric features familiar to users of
tools like Cursor. These include inline code editing, contextual AI
chat, and code generation. The editor also features advanced
capabilities like file system awareness for codebase-wide context and
the ability to view/edit the underlying prompts sent to the AI.

Being a fork from VS Code, Void IDE is able to let its users migrate
their themes, key bindings, and settings.

Developers on Hacker News and Reddit expressed interest, particularly
regarding its open-source nature and privacy stance. Discussions
include comparisons to other AI coding tools and editors. Some
developers expressed skepticism about the proliferation of VS Code
forks, with others asking why not use an extension instead. The
project is actively developed, with the team encouraging
contributions from the community to shape its future roadmap.

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Bruno Couriol

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