[HN Gopher] Kilo Code: Speedrunning open source coding AI
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Kilo Code: Speedrunning open source coding AI
Author : ofou
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-03-26 16:15 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.kilocode.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.kilocode.ai)
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >This success taught me an important lesson: an extremely fast-
| moving community can achieve incredible things
|
| what a trite observation
| janpaul123 wrote:
| And yet few do it!
| achierius wrote:
| Is that true? Plenty of fast-moving communities have achieved
| amazing things, both in computing and outside of it.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Still a small percentage! Let's get more of this happening.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| What is so problematic now about Silicon Valley is that the true
| lesson of hackers have been completely lost.
|
| The primary purpose of the hacker mindset was protection against
| groupthink and cargo culting. And now it seems all people in tech
| only cargo cult and only groupthink.
| hengheng wrote:
| That ship sailed the moment the super-individualist hacker
| turned into the 10x programmer.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| True super-individualist hacker won't use AI tools. :-)
| heymax054 wrote:
| $15 worth of Claude 3.7 tokens? Does this translate to 3 "hello
| world" files?
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| I usually support everything but isn't this literally just "we
| are trying to fork roo code and pay $15 of your tokens so we can
| show VCs that we have users" - as in people like free money. But
| that wouldn't be enough of a bribe to justify using the fork over
| the real project for me at least
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Our backers have no interest in fake metrics. ;) It's a good
| way to quickly get feedback, which is key to our strategy.
| Totally fine to keep using Roo Code (or Cline) of course!
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| I talked to JP about this project. He's excited in a way that's
| hard not to catch. His core thesis is simple: coding agents are
| the future, and the winners will be the ones who can execute.
|
| It won't be OpenAI or Claude. They have other priorities. The
| real opportunity is for small teams who move fast, stay close to
| users, and keep ahead of the pack.
|
| That makes sense. LLMs are already powerful, almost magical at
| times. But using them as coding agents still takes real work.
| They can do amazing things, and be frustrating and make a mess.
| There are rough edges and big gaps.
|
| Those will get fixed. The question is who gets there first.
|
| The counterpoint to that would be that all these tools are gonna
| end up sort of the same and there won't be a way to
| differentiate.
|
| Which way will it play out? I'm not really sure.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| You're too kind!! The speedrun ethos has already been super fun
| with this team. :)
|
| I hope that we'll also be able to bring enough skills,
| strategy, and taste to the space. Time will tell, but we're
| giving it our best shot!
| xnx wrote:
| Gemini 2.5 seems to be the current king of AI coding. In addition
| to being "smart", it has a huge context window. The one-shot
| examples on Twitter are astounding.
| outside2344 wrote:
| Really? I would have said it was Claude-3.7 based on
| experience.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Claude was until yesterday
| janpaul123 wrote:
| JP here! Would love to answer your questions!
|
| We listed a bunch of ideas for larger improvements in the blog:
| Instant app; Up-to-date docs; Prompt/product-first workflows;
| Browser IDE; Local/on-prem models; Live collaboration; Parallel-
| agents; Code variants; Shared context; Open source sharing; MCP
| marketplace; Integrated CI; Monitoring/production agents;
| Security agents; Sketching..
|
| What would you like us to build?
| arevno wrote:
| The obvious thing would be LSP interrogation, which would allow
| the token context to be significantly smaller than entire
| files. If you have one file open, and you are working on a
| function that calls out to N other modules, instead of packing
| the context with N files, you get ONLY the sections of those
| files the LSP tells you to look at.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Yes! This is high on our list. Context window compression is
| a big deal, and this is one of the main ways to do it, IMO.
|
| Have you tried any tools that do this particularly well?
| amarant wrote:
| One thing that I think would be cool, and that could perhaps be
| good starting point, is a TDD agent. How I imagine this
| working:
|
| User (who is a developer) writes tests, and a description of
| the desired application. The agent attempts to build the
| application, compiles the code, runs the tests, and
| automatically feeds any compiler errors and test failures back
| to agent so that it can fix it's own mistakes without input of
| the user.
|
| Based on my experience of current programming agents, I imagine
| it'll take the agent a couple of attempts to get an application
| that compiles and passes all the tests. What would be really
| great to see is an agent (with a companion application
| probably) that automates all those retries in a good way.
|
| i imagine the hardest parts will be to interpret compiler
| output, and (this is where things get real tricky) test output,
| and how to translate that into code changes in the existing
| code base.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Yeah, this is a great workflow! What's more, agents are
| particularly good at writing tests, since they're simpler and
| mostly linear, so they can even help with that part.
|
| As to your point of automating retries, with my last
| prototype I played a lot with having agents do multiple
| parallel implementations, and then pick the first one that
| works, or lets you choose (or even have another agent
| choose).
|
| Have you tried any tools that have this workflow down, or at
| least approach it?
| spankalee wrote:
| Your timeline is indeed crazy fast. Did you recruit the 9
| others in your first week? Did you pitch and secure funding in
| that week too? reply
| janpaul123 wrote:
| In roughly the last 2 weeks, yes. It helped that everyone
| involved also activated their network, so we got a
| multiplicative effect. Can't speak to funding for now
| unfortunately.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This is going to sound a bit odd, but I suggest you detail what
| your tools do well and what they struggle with. For example I
| love Haxe, which is a niche programming language primarily for
| game development.
|
| The vast majority of the time I try to use an llm with it, the
| code is essentially useless as it will try to invent methods
| that don't even exist.
|
| For example if you're coding agents are really only good at
| JavaScript and a little bit of python, tell me that front and
| center.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Good point! In that sense we're similar to most AI coding
| agents in that the languages we do well are the languages the
| mainstream LLMs do well. We might zoom in and add really good
| support for particular languages though (not decided yet), in
| which case we'll def mention that front and center!
|
| Have you found any LLMs or coding agents that work well with
| Haxe? It might be a bit too niche for us (again, not sure
| yet), but I'd be very curious to see what they do well!
| Zondartul wrote:
| In my unqualified opinion, LLMs would do better at niche
| languages or even specific versions of mainstream
| languages, as well as niche frameworks, if they were better
| at consultig the documentation for the language or
| framework, for example, the user could give the LLM a link
| to the docs or an offline copy, and the LLM would
| prioritise the docs over the pretrained code. Currently
| this is not feasible because 1. limited context is shared
| with the actual code, 2. RAG is one-way injection i to the
| LLM, the LLM usually wouldn't "ask for a specific docs
| page" even if they probably should.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| 100% agreed on both points. Point 1 relates to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43486526 as well.
| It's one of the biggest challenges, though maybe it'll
| automatically get better through models with bigger
| context windows (we can't assume that though)?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| https://www.greptile.com/
|
| This works well, however it literally will need to digest
| an entire repository. So for example if I feed it a
| repository for a haxe framework, it'll work much better
| than something like Chat GPT.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Thanks! That does look like a great tool.
| cpldcpu wrote:
| Their approach seems very compelling, but I don't understand
| if/how they are building a differentiated product? The space of
| code agents is already pretty crowded.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| We'll take all the features people love in other products, and
| implement them in a coherent package as quickly as we can.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| "Our goal is to rapidly make the software better, not to have a
| shiny website."
|
| Weird flex, but OK.
| rpmisms wrote:
| Excellent flex. The purpose of a thing is what it does.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| More context, the statement is in reply to the question they
| posed on their own site: "Why is this website so ugly?"
|
| First, I don't think the website is ugly per se. Second, the
| weird flex is assuming that a website which had more effort
| put into it than what they put into theirs is "a shiny
| website."
|
| Design aside, _there 's absolutely no statements regarding
| what makes this product differentiated._ So it doesn't even
| succeed on its own terms.
| tristor wrote:
| To be honest, I have yet to use any GenAI tool that makes me feel
| like it can replace me just writing code (I write this as an
| Engineer turned PM, that would really like the promise of GenAI
| to be true). What I'd actually like to see more than anything is
| a GenAI "agent" that can act like the /user/ of my software to
| help me identify gaps in documentation as the software changes
| and the documentation drifts/becomes stale, and generally help me
| to explore code paths that are off the happy path but will get
| hit by real users. I think there's a lot more value in having
| GenAI help me test/document my work than in trying to do my work,
| because I will always write higher quality code than GenAI can
| produce.
| janpaul123 wrote:
| Totally agree!
| rounce wrote:
| Is this a real open source project or a pretend 'source (maybe-
| kinda) available' kinda thing where the really useful part is
| stuffed behind a paywall and the 'open source' part is just to
| lure you into the walled garden?
| realharo wrote:
| _> We want to build for the dream of billions of programmers;
| billions of artists; billions of scientists--using computing as
| moldable clay._
|
| At that point, why even keep humans in the loop. Just let it
| exist in the background and generate better ideas than any human
| would anyway.
| observationist wrote:
| Just let the car go wherever it wants, faster than any human
| would anyway. Or - just let the fire exist in the background,
| it'll generate more heat than humans will ever need anyway.
|
| The point isn't to make humans pointless. The point is to
| empower humans. We need to remain in control, and be the users
| of the tool, and not a tool for some mindless system.
|
| Intelligence and consciousness are separate things - you can
| automate a lot of intelligence without having even rudimentary
| consciousness or self awareness - LLMs currently in operation
| are at most pseudo-conscious within their test-time contexts,
| and even then, every pass resets whatever awareness there might
| be. With millions of tokens context length, that might start to
| enter into the realm of a thing we should be concerned about,
| but even then, there's no ongoing persisted state to carry
| anything between passes aside from the text or image patch
| tokens or what have you.
|
| What this means, essentially, is that we can augment our human
| capabilities without usurping the agency of some artificial
| being - these AIs are not individual moral agents in their own
| right, and likely will never be unless we specifically build
| that recursion and persistent state into the models, and
| incorporate a realtime adaptive self and world construct.
|
| This means that the software is a tool - use the tool to
| augment your life and be a force multiplier in everything you
| do. The scope of intelligence augmentation has leapt from
| spreadsheets to nearly every cognitive domain in the human
| experience - people proficient with excel were better
| accountants than people using pen and paper. People using
| delivery vans are better than people using a horse and wagon.
| This new technology means that people using AI will be able to
| do more, faster, and likely better, than people who don't.
|
| With neural lace - whatever form it ends up being - we'll end
| up with genuine exocortex augmentation. Even without that
| direct integration, however, the human in the loop is the
| entire point of this technology. There's a tiny list of things
| conscious machines might be good for, and all sorts of deep and
| obvious arguments for not creating a new, self aware, agentic
| species that's immediately in conflict with and on a trajectory
| to outcompete humans.
|
| Use the tool of AI to be a force multiplier for everything in
| your life that AI is capable of handling well. This makes you a
| benevolent dictator for life in your own life, delegating
| everything that makes sense, working with it to free up your
| resources for the things that you decide are the highest
| priority. Spend more time brainstorming, building
| relationships, deploying resources, and getting the most out of
| being human. This is the promise of AI, and why people get
| excited about it. We're going to have a huge struggle, as
| humanity, in dealing the empowerment and amplification of
| everything in our lives. Making sure that we retain agency,
| that humans are ultimately in charge of our own destiny, is
| probably the most important principle to adhere to, above all
| others.
| realharo wrote:
| I was mainly referring to phrases such as _" billions of
| scientists"_ - the point of science is to solve problems and
| discover knowledge. If you have an AI good enough to achieve
| that (billions of scientists), that means it can probably
| progress without being actively driven by people at all - and
| probably do a better job at it too.
|
| We can still do things "for fun", but our efforts will be
| more toys than serious projects (except when it comes to
| relationships with other people).
| quikoa wrote:
| >We don't take any cut, either per token or per top-up. In the
| future we'll add more LLM providers.
|
| So where does the money come from?
| janpaul123 wrote:
| At this point we plan to monetize enterprise features (LDAP
| login, things like that).
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