[HN Gopher] Void: Open-source Cursor alternative
___________________________________________________________________
Void: Open-source Cursor alternative
https://voideditor.com/download-beta
Author : sharjeelsayed
Score : 859 points
Date : 2025-05-08 16:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Can you use OpenRouter with this?
| behnamoh wrote:
| and pay 5% commission? no thanks.
| kristopolous wrote:
| There's also https://aihubmix.com/ that does it at cost
|
| Also litellm
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Doesn't seem to be at cost, there's a markup on the input
| and output tokens. At least for their Anthropic endpoints.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Google ones appear up be at cost. Maybe they do markup on
| specific ones.
|
| If you're all in on Claude then yeah, just go direct.
| Going through a proxy of silly
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Well it's not silly if the proxy has higher rate limits.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Early when sonnet 3.5 was the best coding model lots of
| people used them because of the rate limits on anthropic's
| own API. So that's a plus. There's also the ease of use, one
| key for every model out there, and you get to choose
| providers for things like deepseek / qwen / llama if those
| suit your needs.
| manmal wrote:
| That doesn't sound bad, for extra redundancy?
| tough wrote:
| Yes at onboarding asks for gemini and openrouter keys
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Yes, you can bring OpenRouter or any other provider and connect
| directly! (We don't route your messages through a backend like
| others).
| freeamz wrote:
| Why no linux build? It is just vscode in ts right? And it is an
| electron app right?
| dcminter wrote:
| Presumably you could raise a PR...?
|
| https://github.com/voideditor/void#readme
| ciwchris wrote:
| There's a link for Linux at the bottom of the download page,
| which directs to the releases in GitHub
| mp5 wrote:
| We do have a linux build! (the link is at the bottom of the
| download page). Some systems are a bit finicky so we give more
| options on setting it up.
| skeledrew wrote:
| I gave it a go. Was having issues installing the AppImage,
| which is my preferred method, but extracting the .tar.gz (or
| the .deb) eventually worked.
| behnamoh wrote:
| they always start as open source to bait users. how long until
| this one also turns into BaitWare? I hope it won't since it's
| backed by Y Combinator and has an Apache 2 license.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >how long until this one also turns into BaitWare?
|
| >VSCode Fork.
|
| Already did. Can't wait to hear their super special very
| important reason why this can't exist as an extension.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| manmal wrote:
| The best reason I've seen mentioned by the founder in this
| thread, is showing/hiding panels, and the onboarding flow.
| Those are things you can't do with a plugin. I personally
| also like Cursor's diff view way better than Continue's, and
| maybe that's because a fork gives more control there.
| dang wrote:
| (Edit: the parent comment was edited to add "I hope it won't
| since it's backed by Y Combinator and has an Apache 2 license."
| - that's a good redirection, and I probably wouldn't have
| posted a mod reply if the comment had had that originally.)
|
| (Btw if your comment already has replies, it is good to add
| "Edit:" or something if you're changing it in a way that will
| alter the context of replies.)
|
| ---
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| " _Don 't be curmudgeonly._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| rthnbgrredf wrote:
| They first need to substantially grow the user base as we saw
| with OpenWebUI, only then make an Enterprise offering and
| switch the license from one day to another.
| tough wrote:
| Wait open web-ui has changed license?
| debugnik wrote:
| Yes, they've modified the licence to require preserving
| their branding. I guess it's an anti-fork measure, you'd
| have to infringe either on their licence or on their
| trademark.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901575
| amackera wrote:
| I've got a great setup going with Emacs and Aidermacs[1]. I just
| can't stand using VS Code, it's impossible to configure to my
| liking.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/MatthewZMD/aidermacs
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| what sorts of things are hard to configure?
| spauldo wrote:
| Emacs' configurability is hard to describe to anyone who
| hasn't immersed themselves in that sort of environment.
| There's a small portion of the program written C, but the
| bulk of it is written in elisp. When you evaluate elisp code,
| you're not in some sandboxed extension system - you're at the
| same level as Emacs itself. This allows you to modify nearly
| any aspect of Emacs.
|
| It'd be a security nightmare if it was more popular, but
| fortunately the community hovers around being big enough for
| serious work to be done but small enough that it's not worth
| writing malware for.
| skydhash wrote:
| I don't think it's a security nightmare per-se. Most of the
| time, you're not installing a lot of packages (the built-in
| are extensive) and most of these are small and commonly
| used.
|
| It's like saying the AUR is a security nightmare. You're
| just expected to be an adult and vet what you're using.
| spauldo wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with the number and size of packages
| people install (unless you're comparing them to, say,
| org-mode), but that's not really what I'm talking about.
|
| Emacs runs all elisp code as if it's part of Emacs. Think
| about what Emacs is capable of, and compare that to what
| a browser allows its extensions to do. No widely used
| software works like that because it's way too easy to
| abuse. Emacs gets away with it because it's not widely
| used.
|
| I don't know the first thing about VSCode but I'm willing
| to bet there are strict limits to what its plugins are
| allowed to do.
| skydhash wrote:
| I don't know if that's changed since last I wrote an
| extension for a web browser, but the API is pretty open
| for the current context (tab) that it's executing in. As
| long as it's part of the API, the action is doable. Same
| with VSCode or Sublime. Sandboxed plugins would be pretty
| useless.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I don't know if it's a security nightmare any more than
| other editors that have "plugins" (or the like).
|
| One advantage for Emacs is it's both easy and common read
| the code of the plugins you are using. I can't tell you the
| last time I looked at the source code of a plugin for VS
| Code or any other editor. The last time I looked at the
| code for a plugin in Emacs was today.
| grg0 wrote:
| That last line was totally unexpected, yet deeply
| familiar. Took over a minute to recover from that rofl.
| dotemacs wrote:
| I guess it's hard to switch from a working setup that you've
| invested time in.
|
| Especially since you might not be familiar with the new one.
|
| Personally, I'm trying out things in VS Code, just to see how
| they work. But when I need to work, I do it in Emacs, since I
| know it better.
|
| Also, with VS Code, just while trying it out, simple things
| like cut & paste would stop working (choosing them from the
| menu, they would work, but trying to cut & paste with the key
| shortcuts and the mouse, wouldn't). You'd have to refresh the
| whole view or restart it, for cut & paste to become available
| again.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| My setup: vim -> ctrl + z -> claude -> ctrl + c -> fg
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| good luck copy and pasting with vim with tmux in the mix
| mm263 wrote:
| Skill issue on your part
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| :w !clip.exe
| dbalatero wrote:
| it works?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| it's a shame vim is so stinky because after 15 years of using
| it now i find myself using vscode. I always like vim because
| editing is efficient. Now I dont write as much as supervise a
| lot of the boilerplate code.
|
| Over the years I have gotten better with vim, added phpactor
| and other tooling, but frankly i dont have time to futz and
| its not so polished. With VSCode I can just work. I don't
| love everything about it, but it works well enough with
| copilot i forgot the benefits of vim.
| skydhash wrote:
| I get your experience, but for me using vim is perfect for
| code exploration. The only needed plugins are fzf.vim and
| vinegar. The first for fuzzy navigation and the second for
| quickly browsing the current directory.
|
| LSP experience with VSCode may be superior, but if I truly
| needed that, I would get an IDE and have proper
| intellisense. The LSP in Vim and Emacs is more than enough
| for my basic requirements, which are auto-imports, basic
| linting, and autocomplete to avoid misspellings. VSCode
| lacks Vim's agility and Emacs's powerful text tooling, and
| do far worse on integration.
| jbellis wrote:
| I created an OSS ai coding platform as well: https://brokk.ai
|
| But it's a different take, Brokk is built to let humans supervise
| AI more effectively rather than optimizing for humans reading and
| writing code by hand. So it's not a VS Code fork, it's not really
| an IDE in the traditional sense at all.
|
| Intro video with demo here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw92v-uN5xI
| atak1 wrote:
| Watched your Youtube. I love this - will try it out and give it
| to our team. This is effectively the "full mode" version of the
| mode I currently use Cursor for.
| jbellis wrote:
| Sweet! I'd love to hear how it goes, hmu on
| https://discord.gg/QjhQDK8kAj
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Can it run in a GitHub action ?
|
| What I want is to be able to do is.
|
| 1. Create a branch called TaskForLLM_123 2. Add a file with
| text instructions called Instructions_TaskForLLM_123.txt 3.
| Have a GitHub action read the branch, perform the task and then
| submit a PR.
| manmal wrote:
| I've seen people do this with Claude Code to great success
| (not in a GH Action). Even multiple sessions concurrently.
| Token budget is the limit, obviously.
| jbellis wrote:
| worktree + pr support is coming soon, in the meantime you
| gotta do it manually
| nm980 wrote:
| Is there some benefit from forking vscode instead of creating an
| extension?
| gman83 wrote:
| People keep saying that the extensions API is too limited or
| something, but Cline seems to manage fine with being an
| extension.
| kristopolous wrote:
| They've been changing that recently
| rzzzt wrote:
| Eclipse Theia can host VSCode extensions, but it also has its
| own extension mechanism that offers more customization, it
| could be a viable alternative: https://theia-
| ide.org/docs/extensions/
| mp5 wrote:
| You're right that extensions do manage fine - the main
| differences right now are UX improvements (many of them are
| mentioned above). I can see the differences compounding at
| some point which is why we're focused on the full IDE side.
| MortyWaves wrote:
| It gets them more slop funding if they can say they have an "AI
| IDE".
| mentalgear wrote:
| well you got downvoted, but it's not wrong: funding
| attractiveness of an extension (Cline) vs your "own IDE".
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Of course I got downvoted (but it's gone back to four now)
| because this is HN, where somehow a group of otherwise
| seemingly intelligent people are all patting themselves on
| the back about the latest Y Combinator AI slop funding.
| johnfn wrote:
| As an (ex) VSCode extension developer, VSCode really does lock
| down what you can do as an extension. It's well intentioned and
| likely led to the success of VSCode, but it's not great if you
| want to build entirely new UI interactions. For instance,
| something like the cmd-k inline generation UI in Cursor is
| basically impossible as a VSCode extension.
| stevage wrote:
| Maybe someone should just fork VS Code in a more liberal way,
| then everyone can build their extensions on top of that.
| johnfn wrote:
| The restrictive extension ecosystem was a big part of
| VSCode's success. You can compare to Atom, which allowed
| extensions to do whatever they wanted: Atom ended up
| feeling exceptionally slow and bloated because extensions
| had full latitude to grind your IDE to a halt.
| stevage wrote:
| Yeah, I don't have a problem with that!
|
| But since there seems to be a need for AI-powered forks
| of VS Code, it could make sense for them all to build off
| the same fork, rather than making their own.
| johnfn wrote:
| Isn't that what they're doing by building off of vscode?
| mp5 wrote:
| Yup, just rebased about a week ago
| sureIy wrote:
| Ask Firefox how that went.
|
| Hint: they dropped XUL because every update broke
| extensions
| stevage wrote:
| That's not comparable though, right? I'm suggesting a
| third party forks the main product.
| sureIy wrote:
| Worse. The result is the same: an unmaintainable product,
| and now you also become increasingly incompatible with
| the source.
| zamalek wrote:
| One of the big _disadvantages_ is that it prevents access to
| the VSCode-licensed plugins, such as the good C# LSP (seems EEE
| isn't completely dead). That's something to pay attention to if
| you're considering a fork and use an affected language.
| jsheard wrote:
| Since these products supposedly make developers 1000x more
| productive it should be no problem to just re-implement those
| proprietary MS plugins from scratch. Right? Any
| volunteers...?
| manmal wrote:
| MS will be tuning Copilot to the point it's the best agent
| for C#, for sure. It might take a little longer ofc. But
| Nadella mentioned to Zuck in a fireside chat that they are
| not happy with C# support in LLMs and that they are working
| on this.
| neonsunset wrote:
| C# language server, being Roslyn Language Server, is plugin
| agnostic, it's MIT licensed and is essentially a part of the
| compiler: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/tree/main/src/Lang
| uageServe....
|
| Did you mean to say a debugger? That one has an open
| alternative (NetCoreDbg) alongside a C# extension fork which
| uses it (it's also what VS Codium would install). It's also
| what you'd use via DAP with Neovim, Emacs, etc.
| zamalek wrote:
| Nope, OmniSharp - which uses that AFAIK, is what I'm
| referring to. Something being open source doesn't
| automatically make it good.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Omnisharp is what the base C# extension used previously.
| It has been replaced by Roslyn LS (although can be
| switched to back still). You are talking about something
| you have no up-to-date knowledge of.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Void dev here! As others have mentioned, VSCode strongly limits
| the functionality that you can build as an extension. A few
| things we've built that aren't supported as an extension: - the
| Accept|Reject UI and UX - Cmd+K - Control over the terminal and
| tabs - Custom autocomplete - Smaller things like ability to
| open/close the sidebar, onboarding, etc
|
| It's been a lot harder to build an IDE than an extension, but
| we think having full control over the IDE (whether that's
| VSCode or something else we build in the future) will be
| important in the long run, especially when the next iteration
| of tool-use LLMs comes out (having native control over Git, the
| UI/UX around switching between iterations, etc).
| mentalgear wrote:
| the Accept|Reject UI and UX , Continue as a VS Code extension
| also seems to manage this
| stevage wrote:
| >Smaller things like ability to open/close the sidebar
|
| Are you sure about this one? I'm sure I have used an
| extension whose whole purpose was to automatically open or
| close the sidebar under certain conditions.
| danenania wrote:
| I wish all these companies the best and I understand why
| they're forking, but personally I really don't want my main IDE
| maintained by a startup, especially as a fork. I use Cursor,
| and I've run into a number of bugs at the IDE level that have
| nothing to do with the AI features. I imagine this is only
| going to get worse over time.
| elric wrote:
| Any particular reason why they forked VSCode and not Theia?
| kookamamie wrote:
| Nobody uses Theia, relatively speaking.
| elric wrote:
| This sounds like exactly the kind of thing Theia would be
| useful for. It's easier than a straight up fork of VSCode.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop posting like this?
|
| We're trying for thoughtful, respectful discussion of people's
| work on this site. Snarky, nasty oneliners destroy that.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43928512.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Apologies for the snark, you're correct.
|
| But I do stand by the point. We are seeing umpteen of these
| things launched every week now, all with the exact same goal
| in mind; monetizing a thin layer of abstraction between code
| repos and model providers, to lock enterprises in and sell
| out as quickly as possible. None of them are proposing
| anything new or unique above the half dozen open source
| extensions out there that have gained real community support
| and are pushing the capabilities forward. Anyone who actually
| uses agentic coding tools professionally knows that Windsurf
| is a joke compared to Cline, and that there is no good reason
| whatsoever for them to have forked. This just poisons the
| well further for folks who haven't used one yet.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, the high-order bit is to avoid snark, so thanks about
| that. And it's clear that you know about this space and
| have good information and thoughts to contribute--great!
|
| I would still push back on this:
|
| > all with the exact same goal in mind
|
| It seems to me that you're assuming too much about other
| people's intentions, jumping beyond what you can possibly
| know. When people do that to reduce things to a cynical
| endstate before they've gotten off the ground, that's not
| good for discussion or community. This is part of the
| reason why we have guidelines like these in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
|
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| " _Don 't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine,
| but please don't be rigidly or generically negative._"
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I'll take my paddling. Thanks for the work you do here
| btw, truthfully.
| tough wrote:
| Oh wow this is nice, will try it out.
|
| Ycombinator backed too I guess Vibe coding is here to stay
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > Ycombinator backed too
|
| Oh wow, I didn't even realize. Substantially less appealing of
| a project to me now.
| tough wrote:
| I just gave zed a try after trying it a few months ago and
| it's come along way, not a bad non-cursor chat AI IDE. Its
| tracking mode is pretty cool
| sampton wrote:
| VSCode death by a thousand forks.
| olalonde wrote:
| It feels like everyone and their mother is building coding agents
| these days. Curious how this compares to others like Cline, VS
| Code Copilot's Agent mode, Roo Code, Kilo Code, Zed, etc. Not to
| mention those that are closed source, CLI based, etc. Any
| standout features?
| jadbox wrote:
| My 2c: I rarely need agent mode. As an older engineer, I
| usually know what exactly needs to be done and have no problem
| describing to the LLM what to do to solve what I'm aiming to
| do. Agent mode seems its more for novice developers who are
| unsure what tasks need to be broken down and the strategy that
| they are then solved.
| ivape wrote:
| "Novice mode" has always been true for the newcomer. When I
| was new, I really was at the mercy of:
|
| 1) Authority (whatever a prominent evangelist developer was
| peddling)
|
| 2) The book I was following as a guide
|
| 3) The tutorial I was following as a guide
|
| 4) The consensus of the crowd at the time
|
| 5) Whatever worked (SO, brute force, whatever library,
| whatever magic)
|
| It took a long ass time before I got to throw all five of
| those things out ( _throw the map away_ ). At the moment, #5
| on that list is AI (whatever works). It's a Rite of Passage,
| and because so much of being a developer involves
| autodidacticism, this is a valley you must go through. Even
| so, it's pretty cool when you make it out of that valley (you
| can do whatever you want without any anxiety about _is this
| the right path?_ ). You are never fearful or lost in the
| valley(s) for the most part afterward.
| boredtofears wrote:
| If you use AI agents for all your work as a novice do you
| ever make it out of the valley?
| ivape wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Most people have not deployed enough critical code that
| was mostly written with AI. It's when that stuff breaks,
| and they have to debug it with AI, that's when they'll
| have to contend with the blood, sweat, and tears. That's
| when the person will swear that they'll never use AI
| again. The thing is, we can never _not_ use AI ever
| again. So, this is the trial by fire where many will
| figure out the _depth_ of the valley and emerge from it
| with all the lessons. I can only speculate, but I suspect
| the lessons will be something along the lines of "some
| things should use less AI than others".
|
| I think it's a cool journey, best of luck to the AI-first
| crowd, you will learn lessons the rest of us are not
| brave enough to embark on. I already have a basket of
| lessons, so I travel differently through the valley
| (hint: My ship still has a helm).
| juliushuijnk wrote:
| > that's when they'll have to contend with the blood,
| sweat, and tears.
|
| Or, most software will become immutable. You'll just
| replace it.
|
| You'll throw away the mess, and let a newer LLM build a
| better version in a couple of days. You ask the LLM to
| write down the specs for the newer version based on the
| old code.
|
| If that is true, then the crowd that is not brave enough
| to do AI-first will just be left behind.
| ivape wrote:
| _If that is true, then the crowd that is not brave enough
| to do AI-first will just be left behind._
|
| Not even, _devoured_ might be more apt. If I 'm manually
| moving through this valley and a flood is coming through,
| those who are sticking automatic propellers and
| navigation systems on their ship are going to be the ones
| that can surf the flood and come out of the valley. We
| don't know, this is literally the adventure. I'm
| personally on the side of a hybrid approach. It's fun as
| hell, best of luck to everyone.
|
| It's in poor taste to bring up this example, but I'll
| mention it as softly as I can. There were some people
| that went down looking for the Titanic recently. It could
| have worked, you know what I mean? These are risks we all
| take.
|
| Quoting the Admiral from Starcraft Broodwars cinematic
| (I'm a learned person):
|
| _"... You must go into this with both eyes open "_
| dbalatero wrote:
| > It's in poor taste to bring up this example, but I'll
| mention it as softly as I can. There were some people
| that went down looking for the Titanic recently. It could
| have worked, you know what I mean?
|
| Not sure if you drew the right conclusion from that one.
| aerhardt wrote:
| The scenario you paint sounds very implausible for non-
| trivial applications, but even if it ends up becoming the
| development paradigm, I doubt anyone will be "left
| behind" as such. People will have time to re-skill. The
| question is whether some will ever want to or would
| prefer to take up woodworking.
| skeledrew wrote:
| Whether one takes up woodworking or not depends on
| whether or not development was primarily for profit, with
| little to not intrinsic enjoyment of the role.
| weq wrote:
| Coding and woodworking are similiar from my perspective,
| they are both creative arts. I like coding in different
| lanuages, woodworking is simply a physical manifestion of
| such. In a world where you only need agents, is not a
| world where nerds will be employed. Traditional nerds
| cant stand out from the crowd anymore.
|
| This is peak AI, it only goes downhill from here in terms
| of quality, the AI first flows will be replaceable. Those
| offshored teams that we have suffered with for years now
| will be primarly replaced (google first programmers). And
| developers will continue, working around the edges. The
| differences will be that startups wont be able to use
| technology horading to stifle competition, unless they
| make themselves immune from the ai vacumes.
|
| I can appreciate the comments further up around how AI
| can help unravel the mysterys of a legacy codebase. Being
| able to ask questions about code in quick succession will
| mean that we will feel more confident. AI is lossy, hard
| to direct, yet very confident always. We have 10k line
| functions in our legacy code that nests and nest. How
| confident are you to let ai go and refactor this code
| without oversight and ship to a customer? Thus far im
| not, maybe i dont know the best model and tools to use
| and how to apply them, but even if one of those logic
| branches gets hallucinated im in for a very bumpy ride.
| Watching non-technical people at my org get frusted and
| stuck with it in a loop is a lot more common then the
| successes which seem to be the opposite of the
| experienced engineers who use it as a tool, not a savour.
| But every situation is different.
|
| If you think you company can be a differentiator in the
| market because it has access to the same AI tool as every
| other company? We'll well see about that. I believe there
| has to be more.
|
| Im an experienced engineer of 30+yrs. Technology comes
| and goes. AI is just a another tool in the chest. I use
| it primarily because i dont have to deal with ads. I also
| use it to be a electrical engineer, designing circuts in
| areas i am not familiar with. I can see very simply the
| noivce side of the coin, it feels like you have super
| powers because you just dont know enough about the
| subject to be aware of anything else. Its sped up the
| learning cycle considerably beacause of the
| conversational nature. After a few years of projects, i
| know how to ask better questions to get better results.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| > Or, most software will become immutable. You'll just
| replace it.
|
| The joys of dependency hell combined with rapid
| deprecation of the underlying tooling.
| spookie wrote:
| Slaves to the system.
|
| Do we really want that? To be beholden to the hands of a
| few?
|
| Hell, you can't even purchase a GPU with high enough VRAM
| these days for an acceptable amount of money. In part
| because of geopolitics. I wonder how many
| morerestrictions are there to come.
|
| There's a lot of FOMO going around, those honing their
| programming skills will continue to thrive, and that's a
| guarantee. Don't become a vassal when you can be a king.
| dakiol wrote:
| Same here. It's fine for me to use the ChatGPT web interface
| and switch between it and my IDE/editor.
|
| Context switching is not the bottleneck. I actually like to
| go away from the IDE/keyboard to think through problems in a
| different environment (so a voice version of chatgpt that I
| can talk to via my smartwatch while walking and see some
| answers either on my smartglasses or via sound would be
| ideal... I don't really need more screen (monitor) time)
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Man that workflow is brutal
| divan wrote:
| I use voice mode of ChatGPT almost exclusively using RayBan
| metaglasses(especially when outside / cyciling).
| jjani wrote:
| You _would_ like to, or you 're actually doing that right
| now?
| johnisgood wrote:
| > Same here. It's fine for me to use the ChatGPT web
| interface and switch between it and my IDE/editor.
|
| I do this all the time, and I am completely fine with it.
| Sure, I need to pay more attention, but I think it does
| more good than harm.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Sorry to say but this workflow just isn't great unless
| you're working on something where AI models aren't that
| helpful -- obscure language/libraries/etc where they
| hallucinate or write non-idiomatic solutions if left to run
| much by themselves. In that case, you want the strong human
| review loop that comes from crafting the context via copy
| paste and inspecting the results before copying back.
|
| For well trodden paths that AI is good at, you're wasting a
| ton of time copying context and lint/typechecking/test
| results and copying back edits. You could probably double
| your productivity by having an agentic coding workflow in
| the background doing stuff that's easy while you manually
| focus on harder problems, or just managing two agents that
| are working on easy code.
| fellowmartian wrote:
| I'm a senior engineer and I find myself using agents all the
| time. Working on huge codebases or experimenting with
| different languages and technologies makes everybody
| "novice".
| azinman2 wrote:
| Can you give some examples of how you use it? I'm used to
| asking for very specific things, but less so full on agent
| mode.
| hadlock wrote:
| Agent mode seems to be better at realizing all the places
| in the code base that need to be updated, particularly if
| the feature touches 5+ files, whereas editor starts to
| struggle with features that touch 2-3 files. "every 60
| ticks, predict which items should get cached based on
| user direction of travel, then fetch, transform and cache
| them. when new items need to be drawn, check the cache
| first and draw from there, otherwise fetch and transform
| on demand." this touches the core engine, user movement,
| file operations, graphics etc and agent mode seems to
| have no problem with this at all.
| maronato wrote:
| Personally, I've found agents to be a great
| "multitasking" tool.
|
| Let's say I make a few changes in the code that will
| require changes or additions to tests. I give the agent
| the test command I want it to run and the files to read,
| and let it cycle between running tests and modifying
| files.
|
| While it's doing that, I open Slack or do whatever else I
| need to do.
|
| After a few minutes, I come back, review the agent's
| changes, fix anything that needs to be fixed or give it
| further instructions, and move to the next thing.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| I think a good use of time while waiting for an LLM is to
| ask another LLM for something. Until then Slack will do
| :)
| SkyBelow wrote:
| One benefit is when working on multiple code bases where the
| size of the code base is larger than the time spent working
| on it, so there is still a gap of knowledge. Agents don't
| guarantee the correctness of a search the same an old search
| field does, but it offers a much more expressive way to do
| searches and queries in a code base.
|
| Now that I think about it, I might have only ever used agents
| for searching and answering questions, not for producing
| code. Perhaps I don't trust the AI to build a good enough
| structure, so while I'll use AI, it is one file at a time
| sort of interaction where I see every change it makes. I
| should probably try out one of these agent based models for a
| throw away project just to get more anecdotes to base my
| opinion on.
| volkk wrote:
| kind of ironic, because the novices are the ones that
| absolutely should be doing things by hand to get better at
| the craft.
| skeledrew wrote:
| The day will come when only a few need to be "better at the
| craft". Just as with Assembly and even C.
| spookie wrote:
| C is still in the top 5 most used languages by any
| metric.
| volkk wrote:
| no one writes assembly, but good engineers still
| understand how things work under the hood
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I dont agree. I use agents all the time. I say exactly what
| the agent should do but often changes need to be made in more
| than one place in the code base. Could I prompt it for every
| change one at a time per file? Sure, but it is faster do
| prompt an agent for it.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Considering that Agent Mode saves me a lot of hassle doing
| refactoring ("move the handler to file X and review imports",
| "check where this constant is used and replace it with
| <another> for <these cases>", etc.), I'd say you are missing
| the point...
|
| I actually flip things - I do the breakdown myself in a
| SPEC.md file and then have the agent work through it.
| Markdown checklists work great, and the agent can usually
| update/expand them as it goes.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I couldn't use AI code without agentic mode.
|
| At it's most basic, agentic mode is necessary for building
| the proper context. While I might know the solution at the
| high level, I need the agent to explore the code base to find
| things I reference and bring them into context before writing
| code.
|
| Agentic mode is also super helpful for getting LLMs from
| "99%" correct code to "100%" correct code. I'll ask them to
| do something to verify their work. This is often when the
| agent realizes it hallucinated a method name or used a
| directionally correct, but wrong column name.
| neutronicus wrote:
| My main interest in agent mode is deputizing the C++ compiler
| to tell the LLM about everything it has hallucinated.
| mulmen wrote:
| I think this perspective is better characterized as "solo"
| and not "old". I don't think your age is relevant here.
|
| _Senior_ engineers are not necessarily old but have the
| experience to delegate manageable tasks to peers including
| juniors and collaborate with stakeholders. They're part of an
| organization by definition. They're senior to their peers in
| terms of experience or knowledge, not age.
|
| Agentic AIs slot into this pattern easily.
|
| If you are a _solo_ dev you may not find this valuable. If
| you are a _senior_ then you probably do.
| pdntspa wrote:
| 20yrs engineer here, all my life I've dreamed of having
| something that I could ask general questions about a codebase
| to and get back a cohesive, useful answer. And that future is
| now.
| econ wrote:
| I would put it more generic. I love that one can now ask as
| many dumb questions as it takes about anything.
|
| With humans there is this point where even the most patient
| teacher has to move on to do other things. Learning is best
| when one is curios about something and curiosity is more
| often specific. (When generic one can just read the manual)
| behnamoh wrote:
| The difference is this one is backed by Y Combinator.
| glitchc wrote:
| Does this mean "open source" is really "market capture before
| becoming closed-source"?
| dang wrote:
| I've been at many open source meetups with YC founders and
| can tell you that this is not the thinking at all. Rather,
| the emphasis is on finding a good carve-line between the
| open source offering and the (eventual) paid one, so that
| both sides are viable and can thrive.
|
| Most common these days is to make the paid product be a
| hosted version of the open source software, but there are
| other ways too. Experienced founders emphasize to new
| startups how important it is to get this right and to keep
| your open source community happy.
|
| No one I've heard is treating open source like a bait and
| switch; quite the opposite. What is sought is a win-win
| where each component (open source and paid) does better
| because of the other.
| danenania wrote:
| Exactly right.
|
| I think there's a general misconception out there that
| open sourcing will cannibalize your hosted product
| business if you make it too easy to run. But in practice,
| there's not a lot of overlap between people who want to
| self-host and people who want cloud. Most people who want
| cloud still want it even if they can self-host with a
| single command.
| mp5 wrote:
| One of the founders here - Void will always remain open
| source! There are plenty of examples of an open source
| alternative finding its own niche (eg Supabase, Mattermost)
| and we don't see this being any different.
| dcreater wrote:
| Are any of those examples vc backed?
| pvg wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43763225
| jsheard wrote:
| That doesn't really narrow it down much, YC has backed so
| many AI coding tools that they've started inbreeding. PearAI
| (YC Fall '24) is a fork of Continue (YC Summer '23).
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-
| crit...
| kristopolous wrote:
| Void has been around since last year.
|
| I'm working on an agnostic unified framework to make contexts
| transferrable between these tools.
|
| This will permit zero friction, zero interruption transitions
| without any code modification.
|
| Should have something to show by next week.
|
| Hit me up if you're interested in working on this problem - I'm
| tired of cowboying my projects.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Yup - honestly the space is so open right now still, everyone
| is trying haha. It's got quite hard to keep track of different
| models and their strengths / weaknesses, much less the IDE and
| editor space! I have no idea which of these AI editors would
| suite me best and a new one comes out like every day.
|
| I'm still in vim with copilot and know I'm missing out. Anyway
| I'm also adding to the problem as I've got my own too (don't we
| all?!), at https://codeplusequalsai.com. Coded in vim 'cause I
| can't decide on an editor!
| jmvldz wrote:
| This is cool! I like that you have a visual element for the
| agent working on multiple tickets at a time.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Thanks! And yeah, it really is satisfying watching the
| tickets move from column to column "all on their own" as
| the works gets done!
| dheera wrote:
| The weird thing is, the biggest reason I don't use Cursor much
| is because they just distribute this AppImage, which doesn't
| install or add itself to the Ubuntu app menu, it just sits
| there and I have to do sudo chmod 755
| path/to/Cursor-0.48.6.x86_64.AppImage
| path/to/Cursor-0.48.6.x86_64.AppImage
|
| and then I get greeted with an error message:
| The setuid sandbox is not running as root. Common causes:
| * An unprivileged process using ptrace on it, like a debugger.
| * A parent process set prctl(PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS, ...)
| Failed to move to new namespace: PID namespaces supported,
| Network namespace supported, but failed: errno = Operation not
| permitted
|
| I have to go Googling, then realize I have to run it with
| bin/appimage/Cursor-0.48.6-x86_64.AppImage --no-sandbox
|
| Often I'm lazy to do all of this and just use the Claude /
| ChatGPT web version and paste code back and forth to VS code.
|
| The effort required to _start_ Cursor is the reason I don 't
| use it much. VS code is an actual, bona fide installed app with
| an icon that sits on my screen, I just click it to launch it.
| So much easier. Even if I have to write code manually.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| AppImageLauncher improves the AppImage experience a lot,
| including making sure they get added to the menu. I'm not
| sure if it makes launching without the sandbox easier or not.
| jmvldz wrote:
| Coding agents are the future and it's anyone's game right now.
|
| The main reason I think there is such a proliferation is it's
| not clear what the best interface to coding agents will be. Is
| it in Slack and Linear? Is it on the CLI? Is it a web interface
| with a code editor? Is it VS Code or Zed?
|
| Just like everyone has their favored IDE, in a few years time,
| I think everyone will have their favored interaction pattern
| for coding agents.
|
| Product managers might like Devin because they don't need to
| setup an environment. Software engineers might still prefer
| Cursor because they want to edit the code and run tests on
| their own.
|
| Cursor has a concept of a shadow workspace and I think we're
| going to see this across all coding agents. You kick off an
| async task in whatever IDE you use and it presents the results
| of the agent in an easy to review way a bit later.
|
| As for Void, I think being open source is valuable on it's own.
| My understanding is Microsoft could enforce license
| restrictions at some point down the road to make Cursor
| difficult to use with certain extensions.
|
| Another YC backed open source VS Code is Continue:
| https://www.continue.dev/
|
| (Caveat: I am a YC founder building in this space:
| https://www.engines.dev/)
| handfuloflight wrote:
| When can we expect a release from Engines?
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Void dev here! The biggest players in AI code today are full
| IDEs, not just extensions, and we think that's because they
| simply feel better to use by having more control over the UX.
|
| There are certainly a lot of alternatives that are plugins(!),
| but our differentiation right now is being a full open source
| IDE and having all the features you get out of the big players
| (quick edits, agent mode, autocomplete, checkpoints).
|
| Surprisingly, all of the big IDEs today
| (Cursor/Windsurf/Copilot) send your messages through their
| backend whenever you send a message, and there is no open
| source full IDE alternative (besides Void). Your connection to
| providers is direct with Void, and it's a lot easier to spin up
| your own models/providers and host locally or use whatever
| provider you want.
|
| We're planning on building Git branching for agents in the next
| iteration when LLMs are more independent, and controlling the
| full IDE experience for that will be really important. I worry
| plugins will struggle.
| bglusman wrote:
| The versioning and git branching sounds really neat, I think!
| Can you say more about that? Curious if you've looked at/are
| considering using Jujutsu/JJ[0] in addition or instead of git
| for this, I've played with it some, but been considering
| trying it more with new AI coding stuff, it feels like it
| could be a more natural fit than actually creating explicit
| commits for every change, while still tracking them all? Just
| a thought!
|
| [0]https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj
| jmvldz wrote:
| I agree the branching sounds super cool!
| danenania wrote:
| If you're open to something CLI-based, my project
| Plandex[1] offers git-based branching (and granular
| versioning) for AI coding. It also has a sandbox (also
| built on git) that keeps cumulative changes separate from
| project files until they're ready to apply.
|
| 1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for sharing! We planned on spinning up
| a new Git branch and shallow Git clone (or possibly
| worktree/something more optimized) for each agent, and also
| adding a small auto-merge-with-LLM flow, although something
| more granular like this might feel better. If we don't use
| a versioning tool like JJ at first (may just use Git for
| simplicity at first), we will certainly consider it later
| on, or might end up building our own.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Isn't continue.dev also open source and not using 'their
| backend' when sending stuff? I didn't use it in a while, but
| I know it had support for llama, local models for tab
| completions, etc.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Continue is doing great work, but they're an extension
| (plugin)!
| miroljub wrote:
| What's wrong with a plugin? I don't see the benefit of an
| IDE over a plugin.
| mp5 wrote:
| The extensions API lets you control the sidebar, but you
| basically don't have control over anything in the editor.
| We wouldn't have been able to build our inline edit
| feature, or our navigation UI if we were an extension.
| LiveTheDream wrote:
| Continue.dev is an extension and it does inline edits
| just fine in VS Code and IntelliJ.
| esperent wrote:
| Is inline edits the same as diff edits? In that case I
| think Cline and Roo can do it as well.
| mp5 wrote:
| If I understand your question correctly - Cline and Roo
| both display diffs by using built-in VS Code components,
| while Cursor/Windsurf/Void have built their own custom UI
| to display diffs. Very small detail, and just a matter of
| preference.
| esperent wrote:
| It's about whether the tool can edit just a few lines of
| the file, or whether it needs to stream the whole file
| every time - in effect, editing the whole file even
| though the end result may differ by just a few lines.
|
| I _think_ editing just a part of the file is what Roo
| calls diff editing, and I 'm asking if this is what the
| person above means by line edits.
| mp5 wrote:
| Big fan of Continue btw! There's a small difference in
| how we handle inline edits - if you've used inline edits
| in Cursor/Windsurf/Void you'll notice that a box appears
| above the text you are selecting, and you can type inside
| of it. This isn't possible with VS Code extensions alone
| (you _have_ to type into the sidebar).
| huevosabio wrote:
| So this is closer to Zed than Cursor/Windsurf/Continue,
| right?
|
| edit: ahh just saw that it is also a fork of VS Code, so it
| is indeed OSS Cursor
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Yep, Void is a VSCode fork, but we're definitely not wed to
| VSCode! Building our own IDE/browser-port is not out of the
| picture. We'll have to see where the next iteration of
| tool-use agents takes us, but we strongly feel writing
| typescript/rust/react is not the endgame when describing
| algorithms to a computer, and a text-based editor might not
| be ideal in 10 years, or even 2.
| vunderba wrote:
| I think it'd be worthwhile to call out in a FAQ/comparison
| table specifically how something like an "AI powered IDE"
| such as Cursor/Void differs from just using an IDE + a full-
| featured agentic plugin (VS Codium + Cline).
| monkpit wrote:
| I agree, having used Cline I am not sure what advantages
| this would offer, but I would like to know (beyond things
| like "it's got an open source ide" - Cline has those too
| specifically because I can use it in my open source ide)
| jjani wrote:
| > The biggest players in AI code today are full IDEs, not
| just extensions,
|
| Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly gaining
| ground, it's biggest current limitation being cost, which is
| likely to get resolved sooner rather than later (Gemini Code
| anyone?). You're right about the _right now_ , but with the
| pace at which things are moving, the trends are honestly more
| relevant than the status quo.
| opdahl wrote:
| > Claude Code (neither IDE nor extension) is rapidly
| gaining ground
|
| What makes you say that? From what I'm observing it doesn't
| seem to be talked much about at all.
| olalonde wrote:
| Claude Code's announcement earned 2k+ point on HN when it
| launched (7th most popular HN submission this year).
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=claude+code
| opdahl wrote:
| Together with 3.7 Sonnet. And the claim was that it is
| rapidly gaining ground, not that it sparked initial
| interest. I still don't see much proof of adoption. This
| is actually the first I've heard about anyone actually
| actively using it since its launch.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >This is actually the first I've heard about anyone
| actually actively using it
|
| I've been reaching for Claude Code first for the last
| couple weeks. They had offered me a $40 credit after I
| tried it and didn't really use it, maybe 6 weeks ago, but
| since I've been using it a lot. I've spent that credit
| and another $30, and it's REALLY good. One thing I like
| about Claude Code is you can "/init" and it will create a
| "CLAUDE.md" that saves off it's understanding of the
| code, and then you can modify it to give it some working
| knowledge.
|
| I've also tried Codex with OpenAI and o4-mini, and it
| works very well too, though I have had it crash on me
| which claude has not.
|
| I did try Codex with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, but it is
| really weird. It seems to not be able to do any editing,
| it'll say "You need to make these edits to this file (and
| describe high level fixes) and then come back when you're
| done and I'll tell you the edits to do to this other
| file." So that integration doesn't seem to be complete. I
| had high hopes because of the reviews of the new 2.5 Pro.
|
| I also tried some claude-like use in the AI panel in Zed
| yesterday, and made a lot of good progress, it seemed to
| work pretty well, but then at some point it zeroed out a
| couple files. I think I might have reached a token limit,
| it was saying "110K out of 200K" but then something else
| said "120K" and I wonder if that confused it. With Codex
| you can compact the history, I didn't see that in Zed.
| Then at some point my Zed switched from editing to
| needing me to accept every change. I used nearly the
| entire trial Zed allowance yesterday asking it to
| impelement a Galaga-inspired game, with varying success.
| jjani wrote:
| Spending too much time on HN and other spaces (including
| offline) where people talk about what they're doing.
| Making LLM-based things has also been my job since pretty
| much the original release of GPT3.5 which kicked off the
| whole industry, so I have an excuse.
|
| The big giveaway is that everyone who _has_ tried it
| agrees that it 's clearly the best agentic coding tool
| out there. The very few who change back to whatever they
| were using before (whether IDE fork, extension or
| terminal agent), do so because of the costs.
|
| Relevant post on the front page right now: A flat pricing
| subscription for Claude Code [0]. The comment section
| supports the above as well.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43931409
| opdahl wrote:
| I personally tried it and I felt it way more confusing to
| use compared to using Cursor with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The
| CLI interface seems to me more to lend itself for <<vibe
| coding>> where you actually never work and look with the
| actual code. That is why I think Cursor and IDEs are more
| popular than CLI only tools.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Just want to share our thinking on terminal-based tools!
|
| We think in 1-2 years people will write code at a systems
| level, not a function level, and it's not clear to us that
| you can do that with text. Text-based tools like Claude
| Code work in our text-based-code systems today, but I think
| describing algorithms to a computer in the future might
| involve more diagrams, and terminal will not be ideal.
| That's our reasoning against building a tool in the
| terminal, but it clearly works well today, and is the
| simplest way for the labs to train/run terminal tool-use
| agents.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of
| things but they suck ass when it comes to providing
| details.
|
| There's a reason why fully creating systems from them
| died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code
| gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of
| arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.
|
| Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".
| andrewpareles wrote:
| This is completely true, and it's a really common
| objection.
|
| I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize
| codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard
| to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that
| at least stray from plaintext in some way.
|
| I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to
| create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data
| structures, or a React project and its components and
| state, etc.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Terminals aren't too far away from evolving [0] beyond
| UTF-8 characters. Therefore I suspect IDEs and CLIs will
| continue their turf wars as always.
|
| > hard to imagine that we won't have digests and
| overviews
|
| 100% agreed here.
|
| _Disclosure: I 'm the author of the project below._
|
| [0] https://terminal.click
| ayewo wrote:
| > I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI
| to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data
| structures, or a React project and its components and
| state, etc.
|
| Sounds exactly like what DeepWiki is doing from the Devin
| AI Agent guys: https://deepwiki.com
| conartist6 wrote:
| You have lost all connection to reality.
|
| Hey by the way I hear all communication between people is
| going to shift to pictograms soon. You know -- emoji and
| hieroglyphs. Text just isn't ideal, you know
| km144 wrote:
| Every system can be translated can be translated to text
| though. If there is one thing LLMs have essentially
| _always_ been good at, it is processing written language.
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| I don't know Claude Code, so if it's "neither IDE nor
| extension", what is it?
| girvo wrote:
| It's a CLI tool
| SegmentTree wrote:
| I think it's worth mentioning that the Theia IDE is a fully
| open source VS Code-compatible IDE (not a fork of VS Code)
| that's actively adding AI features with a focus on
| transparency and hackability.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| We considered Theia, and even building our own IDE, but
| obviously VSCode is just the most popular. Theia might be a
| good play if Microsoft gets more aggressive about VSCode
| forks, although it's not clear to us that people will be
| spending their time writing code in 1-2 years. Chances are
| definitely not 0 that we end up moving away from VSCode as
| things progress.
| conartist6 wrote:
| It's the most popular because the tech is decades old.
| You're all rushing to copy obsolete technology. Now we
| have 10 copies of an obsolete technology.
|
| We used to know better
| conartist6 wrote:
| I mean I guess I should thank the 10 teams who forked
| VSCode for proving beyond all reasonable doubt that
| VSCode is architecturally obsolete. I was already trying
| to make that argument, but the 10 forks do it so much
| better.
| nico wrote:
| > and there is no open source full IDE alternative (besides
| Void).
|
| And Zed: https://zed.dev
|
| Yesterday on the front page of HN:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912844
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| And Emacs, also mentioned in that thread (by me, but
| still).
| swyx wrote:
| this joke could not have been more perfectly set up if it
| were staged. thanks for the guffaw.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| I should have been more careful with my wording - I was
| talking about major VS Code-based IDEs as alternatives.
| Zed is very impressive, and we've been following them
| since before Void's launch!
| jeron wrote:
| openAI chose to acquire windsurf for 3B instead of building
| something like Void, very curious decision. awesome project,
| will be closely following this
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| >> The biggest players in AI code today are full IDEs, not
| just extensions
|
| Are you sure? I have some expertise with my IDE, some other
| extension which solve problems for me, a wide range of them,
| I've learnt shortcuts, troubleshooting, where and who ask for
| help, but now you're telling me that I am better off leaving
| all that behind, and it's better for me? ;o
| _kidlike wrote:
| Maybe I live in a bubble, but it's surprising to me that
| nobody mentions Jetbrains in all these discussions. Which in
| my professional working experience are _the only_ IDEs anyone
| uses :shrug:
| TingPing wrote:
| I'm not sure I've met a Jetbrains user in projects I've
| worked on. It's a paid product so just has a small
| userbase.
| weberer wrote:
| Pycharm is extremely popular in the data science world.
| The Community Edition is free and has 99% of the features
| most people need. Even when developing with Cursor, I
| find myself going back to Pycharm just to use the
| debugger, which I greatly prefer to the debugger used in
| these VS Code forks.
| TingPing wrote:
| Lately I've only tried clion, which has no free version.
| Personally it didn't function as well as vscode for C++.
| hiatus wrote:
| You may have missed it but they did release a free
| version of clion recently (for personal use).
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43914705
| whstl wrote:
| Funny enough, I know a lot of people who work at
| JetBrains, but only a few end-users.
|
| Their use base is completely different. And we're both in
| a bubble, I reckon. IntelliJ people also only know a few
| VSCode users!
| stusmall wrote:
| Here are some numbers on their user base in real number
| and dollar amounts:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2024/
|
| Their tools are wildly popular in many spaces. It isn't
| for everyone though. It's totally believable in your
| circle no one uses their tools, but it isn't niche.
| ramoz wrote:
| You forgot the best one to compare against - Claude Code.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| We think terminal tools like Claude Code are a good way for
| research teams to experiment with tool use (obviously pure
| text), but definitely don't see the terminal as the endgame
| for these tools.
|
| I know some folks like using the terminal, but if you like
| Claude Code you should consider plugging your API key into
| Void and using Claude there! Same exact model and provider
| and price, but with a UI around the tool calls, checkpoints,
| etc.
| ramoz wrote:
| I'm a traditional millennial brat - high preference for UI
| as well.
|
| That is until I started using Claude Code.
|
| It's not about the terminal. It's just a better UX in
| general.
| nowittyusername wrote:
| I've tried many of AI coding IDE's, the best ones like RooCode
| are good simply because they don't gimp your context. The
| modern day models are already more then capable enough for many
| coding tasks, you just need to leave them alone and let them
| utilize their full context window and all will go well. If you
| hear a bad experience with any of these IDE's, most of the time
| its because its limiting use of context or improper management
| of related functions.
| aylmao wrote:
| > It feels like everyone and their mother is building coding
| agents these days.
|
| For real. I think it's because code editors seem to be in that
| perfect intersection of:
|
| - A tool for programmers. Programmers like building for
| programmers.
|
| - A tool for productivity. Companies will pay for productivity.
|
| - A tool that's clearly AI-able. VC's will invest in AI tools.
|
| - A tool with plenty of open source lift. The clear, common
| (and extreme?) example of this being forking VSCode.
|
| Add to that the recent purchase of VSCode-fork [1] Windsurf for
| $3 billion [2] and I suspect we will see many more of these.
|
| [1]: https://windsurf.com/blog/why-we-built-
| windsurf#:~:text=This...
|
| [2]: https://community.openai.com/t/openai-is-acquiring-
| windsurf-...
| johnfn wrote:
| This is very cool and I'm always happy to see more competition in
| this space. That said, two suggestions:
|
| - The logo looks like it was inspired directly from the Cursor
| logo and modified slightly. I would suggest changing it.
|
| - It might be wise to brand yourself as your own thing, not just
| an "open source Cursor". I tend to have the expectation that
| "open source [X]" projects are worse than "[X]". Probably unfair,
| I know.
| freedomben wrote:
| A minor counterpoint, I personally like the "open source Xyz"
| because I instantly know what the product is supposed to do.
| It's also very SEO friendly because you don't know the name of
| the open source version before you find it, so you can
| Kagi/Google/DDG "open source Cursor" and get it as a top
| result, instead of a sea of spammy slime.
| Timwi wrote:
| > I personally like the "open source Xyz" because I instantly
| know what the product is supposed to do.
|
| But that assumes that you're already familiar with the non-
| open-source software referenced. I've never used Cursor so I
| have no idea what it can or can't do. I'm pretty sure I would
| never have discovered Inkscape if it had consistently been
| described as an "open-source Illustrator" as I've simply
| never used Adobe software.
| mp5 wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestions - these issues have been a bit
| painful for us, and we will probably fix them in the next major
| update to Void.
|
| Believe it or not, the logo similarity was actually
| unintentional, though I imagine there was subconscious bias at
| play (we created ours trying to illustrate "a slice of the
| Void").
| mentos wrote:
| Maybe the icon is a piece of cake with a sphere void in it?
| Trying to play on how easy it is - 'it's a piece of cake'
| Demiurge wrote:
| I don't know anything about the project, I use Zed editor, but I
| think the logo is really cool.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor /GitHub Copilot
| alternative_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41563958 -
| Sept 2024 (154 comments)
| evo_9 wrote:
| If I move off Cursor, it's def not going to be to another vs-code
| derivative. Zed has it right - build it from the ground up,
| otherwise, MS is going to kneecap you at some point.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The threat is Msft cutting you off from the ecosystem. That
| means growing an ecosystem and not merely the editor.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Great to see more people thinking this way, finally. Would be
| even better to see the same change wrt typescript, another MS
| trojan horse.
| echelon wrote:
| 100%. Microsoft can't interfere with Zed.
|
| Additionally, Zed is written in Rust and has robust hardware-
| accelerated rendering. This has a tangible feel that other
| editors do not. It feels just so smooth, unlike clunky
| heavyweight JetBrains products. And it feels solid and sturdy,
| unlike VS Code buffers, which feel like creaky webviews.
| conartist6 wrote:
| Zed didn't build from the ground up though. I mean, they did
| for a lot of stuff, but crucially they decided to rely on the
| LSP ecosystem so most of the investment in improving Zed is
| also a direct investment in improving VSCode.
|
| If you can't invest in yourself without making the same size
| investment in your competitor, you probably have no path to
| actually win out over that competitor.
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| I've been using Claude coder, I like this exp way more than these
| ai ides way more.
| leogout wrote:
| I subscribed to the mailing list of void long ago to be notified
| once the alpha opens, but i've never recieved anything. I forgot
| about it until today.
| mp5 wrote:
| We've been holding off on this until Void is out of Beta.
| alp1n3-dev wrote:
| The time to sell a VSCode fork for 3B was a week ago. If someone
| wants to move off of VSCode, why would they move to a fork of it
| instead of to Zed, JetBrains, or a return to the terminal?
|
| Next big sale is going to be something like "Chrome Fork + AI +
| integrated inter-app MCP". Brave is eh, Arc is being left to die
| on its own, and Firefox is... doing nothing.
| setnone wrote:
| This is realy cool and checks my privacy boxes, great name too. I
| will be testing it out and will consider contributing.
|
| One thing i'd really like to have is a manual order for folders
| or even files in the explorer view.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Nice - also open competition is always good for users!
| dkersten wrote:
| Yet another vscode fork...
| antirez wrote:
| Mandatory reminder that "agentic coding" works way worse than
| just using the LLM directly, steering it ad needed, filling the
| gaps, and so forth. The value is in the semantical capabilities
| of the LLM itself: wrapping it will make it more convenient to
| use, but always less powerful.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I beg to disagree, Salvatore... Have a go at VS Code with Agent
| mode turned on (you'll need a paid plan to use Claude and/or
| Gemini, I think). It gets me out of vim, so yeah, it's that
| good. :)
|
| Tip: Write a SPEC.md file first. Ask the LLM to ask _you_ about
| what might be missing from the spec, and once you "agree" ask
| it to update the SPEC.md or create a TODO.md.
|
| Then iterate on the code. Ask it to implement one of the
| features, hand-tune and ask it to check things against the
| SPEC.md and update both files as needed.
|
| Works great for me, especially when refactoring--the SPEC.md
| grounds Claude enough for it not to go off-road. Gemini is a
| bit more random...
| antirez wrote:
| Interacting with the LLM directly _is_ more work. What I mean
| is that a wrapper in the best conditions will not damage too
| much the quality of the LLM itself. In the chat, you
| continuously avoid suboptimal choices executed by the model,
| if you are a very experienced code, and a fix here, a fix
| there, you continuously avoid local minima. After a few
| iterations you find that your whole project is a lot better
| designed than otherwise.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Oh, sure. I don't rely on the LLM to write all the code. I
| do "trust" it to refactor things to a shape I want, and to
| automate chores like moving chunks of code around or build
| a quick wrapper for a library.
|
| One thing I particularly don't like about LLMs is that
| their Python code feels like Java cosplay (full of
| pointless classes and methods), so my SPEC.md usually has a
| section on code style right at the start :)
| Inuit wrote:
| Here comes another. Everyone saw that 3B Windsurf money and
| production go brrr
| mp5 wrote:
| Void actually launched before the Windsurf IDE existed!
|
| http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42127882
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41563958
| monoid73 wrote:
| Another one? People saw that 3B windsurf money.
| apostle36 wrote:
| Open source and not available on Linux?
| lnenad wrote:
| Yeah this surprised me as well lol
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Given Void is backed by Ycombinator, what's the business plan to
| start generating revenue?
| mp5 wrote:
| This is a good question. Because we're open source, we will
| always allow you to host models locally for free, or use your
| own API key. This makes monetization a bit difficult in the
| short term. As with many devtool companies, the long-term value
| comes from enterprise sales.
| elAhmo wrote:
| There is no plan with YC in this space, everything is just
| basically vibe investing and hoping something sticks.
|
| Continue.dev also received investment from YC. Remember PearAI?
| Very charismatic founders that just forked Continue.dev and got
| a YC investment [1].
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/20/after-causing-outrage-on-t...
| hintymad wrote:
| A trajectory question: do we still have the debate that whether
| open-source software takes away SDE jobs or makes the pie grow
| bigger to create more jobs? The booming OS community in the past
| seem have created multiple billion-dollar markets. On the other
| hand, we have a lot less growth than before now, and I was
| wondering if OSS has started to suppressing the demand of SDEs.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > Welcome to Void.
|
| Flaskbacks to that pretty good Voyager episode.
| guybedo wrote:
| fwiw here's a more structured/organized version of this thread:
| https://extraakt.com/extraakts/void-ai-coding-tool-discussio...
| mdaniel wrote:
| "Structured," eh?
|
| Anyway, I didn't know what your service was trying to do so I
| clicked on the homepage, clicked Sources to see what else was
| there, it cited
| <https://extraakt.com/extraakts?source=reddit#:~:text=Open-
| so...> but the hyperlink took me back to the HN thing, which
| defeats the purpose of having a source picker
| fcoury wrote:
| One thing I noticed is that there's no cost tracking, so it's
| very hard to predict how much you're spending. This is fine on
| tools like Cursor that are all inclusive, but is something that
| is really necessary if you're bringing your own API keys.
|
| Is this feature on the roadmap?
| mp5 wrote:
| This is a great suggestion. We're actually storing the
| input/output costs of most models, but aren't computing cost
| estimates yet. Definitely something to add. My only hesitation
| is that token-based cost estimates may not be accurate (most
| models do not provide their tokenizers, so you have to eg.
| estimate the average number of characters per token in order to
| compute the cost, and this may vary per model).
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| It'd probably be useful to just show cost after the fact
| based on the usage returned from the API. Even if I don't
| know how much my first request will cost, if I know my last
| request cost x cents then I can probably have a good idea
| from there.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| Given that there's a dozen agentic coding IDEs, I only use Cursor
| because of the few features they have like auto-identification of
| the next cursor location (I find myself hitting tab-tab-tab-tab a
| lot, it speeds up repetitive edits). Are there any other IDEs
| that implement these QOL features, including Void (given it touts
| itself specifically as a Cursor alternative)?
| ramoz wrote:
| I think QOL will shift away from your keyboard. Give Claude
| Code a try and you'll understand what I mean. Developer UX will
| shift away from traditional IDEs. At this point I could use
| notepad for the the type of manual work I do vs how I
| orchestrate Claude Code.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| The reason I have never bothered with Claude Code (or even
| other agentic tools), is that I still code mostly by hand.
|
| When I am using LLMs, I know exactly what the code _should_
| be and just am using it as a way to produce it faster (my
| Cursor rules are extremely extensive and focused on my
| personal architecture and code style, and I share them across
| all my personal projects), rather than producing a whole
| _feature_. When I try and use just the agent in Cursor, it
| always needs significant modifications and reorganization to
| meet my standards, even with the extensive rules I have set
| up.
|
| Cursor appeals to me because those QOL features don't take
| away the actual code writing part, but instead augment it and
| get rid of some of the tedium.
| nektro wrote:
| one of these is gonna have malware and we'll wonder how we never
| saw it
| w10-1 wrote:
| May I ask why did you decide against starting with (Eclipse)
| Theia instead of VSCode?
|
| It's compatible but has better integration and modularity, and
| doing so might insulate you a bit from your rather large
| competitor controlling your destiny.
|
| Or is the exit to be bought by Microsoft? By OpenAI? And thus to
| more closely integrate?
|
| If you're open-source but derivative, can they not simply steal
| your ideas? Or will your value depend on having a lasting hold on
| your customers?
|
| I'm really happy there are full-fledged IDE alternatives, but I
| find the hub-and-spoke model where VSCode/MS is the only decider
| of integration patterns is a real problem. LSP has been a race to
| the bottom, feature-wise, though it really simplified IDE support
| for small languages.
| soylentEnjoyer wrote:
| BYOK
|
| We live in the age of dev tools
| BeetleB wrote:
| Feedback 1: The README really needs more details. What does it
| do/not do? Don't assume people have used Cursor. If it is a
| Cursor alternative, does it support all of Cursor's features?
|
| As a non-Cursor user who does AI programming, there is nothing
| there to make me want to try it out.
|
| Feedback 2: I feel any new agentic AI tool for programming should
| have a comparison against Aider[1] which for me is the tool to
| benchmark against. Can you give a compelling reason to use this
| over Aider? Don't just say "VSCode" - I'm sure there are
| extensions for VSCode that work with Aider.
|
| As an example of the questions I have:
|
| - Does it have something like Aider's repomap (or better)?
|
| - To what granularity can I limit the context?
|
| [1] https://aider.chat/
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely add a feature list.
| To answer your question, yes - we support Cursor's features
| (quick edits, agent mode, chat, inline edits, links to
| files/folders, fast apply, etc) using open source and openly-
| available models (for example, we haven't trained our own
| autocomplete model, but you can bring any autocomplete model or
| "FIM" model).
|
| We don't have a repomap or codebase summary - right now we're
| relying on .voidrules and Gather/Agent mode to look around to
| implement large edits, and we find that works decently well,
| although we might add something like an auto-summary or Aider's
| repomap before exiting Beta.
|
| Regarding context - you can customize the context window and
| reserved amount of token space for each model. You can also use
| "@ to mention" to include entire files and folders, limited to
| the context window length. (you can also customize the model's
| reasoning ability, think tags to parse, tool use format
| (gemini/openai/anthropic), FIM support, etc).
| throwup238 wrote:
| An important Cursor feature that no one else seems to have
| implemented yet is documentation indexing. You give it a base
| URL and it crawls and generates embeddings for API
| documentation, guides, tutorials, specifications, RFCs, etc
| in a very language agnostic way. That plus an agent tool to
| do fuzzy or full text search on those same docs would also be
| nice. Referring to those @docs in the context works really
| well to ground the LLMs and eliminate API hallucinations
|
| Back in 2023 one of the cursor devs mentioned [1] that they
| first convert the HTML to markdown then do n-gram
| deduplication to remove nav, headers, and footers. The state
| of the art for chunking has probably gotten a lot better
| though.
|
| [1] https://forum.cursor.com/t/how-does-docs-crawling-
| work/264/3
| RobinL wrote:
| I agree that on the face of it this is extremely useful. I
| tried using it for multiple libraries and it was a complete
| failure though, it failed to crawl fairly standard mkdocs
| and sphynx sites. I guess it's better for the 'built in'
| ones that they've pre-indexed
| throwup238 wrote:
| I use it mostly to index stuff like Rust docs on docs.rs
| and rendered mdbooks. The RAG is hit or miss but I
| haven't had trouble getting things indexed.
| steveharman wrote:
| Just use the Context7 MCP ? Actually I'm assuming Void
| supports MCP.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Agreed - this is one of the better solutions today.
| Aeroi wrote:
| can you elaborate on how context7 handles document
| indexing or web crawling. If i connect to the mcp server,
| will it be able to crawl websites fed to it?
| gesman wrote:
| Context7 is missing lots of info pieces from the repos it
| indexing and getting overbloated with similar sounding
| repos, which is becoming confusing for LLM's.
| andrewpareles wrote:
| This is a good point.We've stayed away from documentation
| assuming that it's more of a browser agent task, and I
| agree with other commenters that this would make a good MCP
| integration.
|
| I wonder if the next round of models trained on tool-use
| will be good at looking at documentation. That might solve
| the problem completely, although OSS and offline models
| will need another solution. We're definitely open to trying
| things out here, and will likely add a browser-using docs
| scraper before exiting Beta.
| mapmap wrote:
| The continue.dev plugin for Visual Studio Code provides
| documentation indexing. You provide a base URL and a tag.
| The plugin then scrapes the documentation and builds a RAG
| index. This allows you to use the documentation as context
| within chat. For example, you could ask @godotengine what
| is a sprite?
| conartist6 wrote:
| So this is why everything is going behind Anubis then?
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Nah, Anubis combats systematic Scraping of the web by
| data scrapers, not actual user agents.
| conartist6 wrote:
| A scraper in this case is the agent of the user. Doesn't
| make it not a scraper that can and will get trapped.
| lgiordano_notte wrote:
| Cursor's doc indexing is acc one of the few AI coding
| features that feels like it saves time. Embedding full doc
| sites, deduping nav/header junk, then letting me reference
| @docs inline actually improves context grounding instead of
| guessing APIs.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Do you support @Docs?
|
| https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs
| _345 wrote:
| Am I the only one that has had bad experiences with aider? For
| me each time I've tried it, I had to wrestle with and beg the
| AI to do what I wanted it to do, almost always ending in me
| just taking over and doing it myself.
|
| If nearly everytime I use it to accomplish something it gets it
| 40-85% correct and I have to go in to fix the other 60-15%,
| what is the point? It's as slow as hand writing code then, if
| not slower, and my flow with Continue is simply better:
|
| 1. CTRL L block of code 2. Ask a question or give a task 3. I
| read what it says and then apply the change myself by CTRL C
| and then tweaking the one or two little things it inevitably
| misunderstood about my system and its requirements
| attentive wrote:
| That depends on models you use and your prompts.
|
| Use gemini-2.5pro or sonnet3.5/3.7 or gpt-4.1
|
| Be as specific and detailed in your prompts as you can.
| Include the right context.
| dingnuts wrote:
| and what do you do if you value privacy and don't want to
| share everything in your project with silicon valley, or
| you don't want to spend $8/hr to watch Claude do your hobby
| for you?
|
| I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI
| is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow
| HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does
| it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.
|
| If I have to write a prompt as long as Claude's system
| prompt in order to get reliable edits, I'm not sure I've
| saved any time at all.
|
| At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless
| with local models. That's certainly my experience.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I haven't used local models. I don't have the 60+gb of
| vram to do so.
|
| I've tested aider with gemini2.5 with prompts as basic as
| 'write a ts file with pupeteer to load this url, click on
| button identified by x, fill in input y, loop over these
| urls' and it performed remarkably well.
|
| Llm performance is 100% dependent on the model you're
| using so you ca hardly generalize from a small model you
| run locally on a cpu.
| mp5 wrote:
| Local models just aren't there yet in terms of being able
| to host locally on your laptop without extra hardware.
|
| We're hoping that one of the big labs will distill an ~8B
| to ~32B parameter model that performs SOTA benchmarks!
| This would be huge both in cost and probably make it
| reasonable for most people to code with agents in
| parallel.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Is this post just you yelling at the wind? What does this
| have to do with the post you replied to?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless
| with local models. That's certainly my experience.
|
| I don't see it as an admission. I'd wager 99% of Aider
| users simply haven't tried local models.
|
| Although I would expect they would be much worse than
| Sonnet, etc.
|
| > I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me
| that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say,
| fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those
| models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some
| examples.
|
| Examples? Aider is a great tool and much (probably most)
| of it is written by AI.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| This is exactly the issue I have with copilot in office.
| It doesn't learn from my style so I have to be very
| specific how I want things. At that point it's quicker to
| just write it myself.
|
| Perhaps when it can dynamically learn on the go this will
| be better. But right now it's not terribly useful.
| mp5 wrote:
| I really wonder why dynamic learning hasn't been explored
| more. It would be a huge moat for the labs (everyone
| would have to host and dynamically train their own model
| with a major lab). Seems like it would make the AI way
| smarter too.
| troupo wrote:
| > or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.
|
| There's no such thing as a "right prompt". It's all snake
| oil. https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-
| engineering
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Aider is quite configurable, you need to look at the
| leaderboard and copy one of the high performing model/config
| setups. Additionally, you need to autoload files such as the
| readme and coding guidelines for your project.
|
| Aider's killer features are integration of automated
| lint/typecheck/test and fix loops with git checkpointing. If
| you're not setting up these features you aren't getting the
| full value proposition from it.
| larusso wrote:
| Never used the tool. But it seems both aider and cursor are
| not at their strongest out of the box? I read similar thing
| about cursor and doing custom configuration so it picks up
| coding guidelines etc etc. Is there some kind of agreed
| best practice standard that is documented or just try and
| error best practices from users sharing these?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Aider's leaderboard is a baseline "best practice" for
| model/edit format/mode selection. Beyond that, it's
| basically whatever you think are best practices in
| engineering and code style, which you should capture in
| documents that can serve double duty both for AI and for
| human contributors. Given that a lot of this stuff is
| highly contentious it's really up to you as to pick and
| choose what you prefer.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _The README really needs more details. What does it do /not
| do? Don't assume people have used Cursor. If it is a Cursor
| alternative, does it support all of Cursor's features?_
|
| That's all in the website, not the README, but yes a bulleted
| list or identical info from the site would work well.
| SafeDusk wrote:
| I've used both Cursor and Aider but I've always wanted
| something simple that I have full control on, if not just to
| understand how they work. So I made a minimal coding agent
| (with edit capability) that is fully functional using only
| seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and
| think.
|
| I can just disable `ask` tool for example to have it easily go
| full autonomous on certain tasks.
|
| Have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami to see if it
| might be useful for you.
| larusso wrote:
| Will check this out. I like to have a bit more control over
| my stack if possible.
| MantisShrimp90 wrote:
| Projects like this are great because open source versions need to
| figure out the right way to do things, rather than the hacky,
| closed, proprietary alternatives that pop up first and are just
| trying to consume as many users as possible to get a most
| quickly.
|
| In that case, a shitty, closed system is good actually because
| it's another thing your users will need to "give up" if they move
| to an alternative. By contrast, an open ide like void will
| hopefully make headway on an open interface between ides and the
| llm agents in such a way that it can be adapted by neovim people
| like me or anyone else for that matter
| alisinabh wrote:
| Zed (https://zed.dev/agentic) also released agentic code edits
| (similar to Cursor) which I tried and really like.
| WD-42 wrote:
| And it's not yet another editor running in a web browser which
| is really, really nice.
| ramon156 wrote:
| Its _fast_. Love it !
| muppetman wrote:
| Doesn't it need to download a massive nodejs binary to be
| useful?
| WD-42 wrote:
| For what?
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Just for syntax highlighting no. But for any ide like
| features it need language servers and some of them are
| node based.
|
| https://zed.dev/docs/languages
| muppetman wrote:
| I dunno, you tell me? https://github.com/zed-
| industries/zed/issues/12589
| WD-42 wrote:
| Right. "To be useful" includes leveraging language
| servers, which they aren't going to write from scratch.
| So what's your point?
| hu3 wrote:
| Clearly. Zed wouldn't have blurry text rendering on some
| resolutions if they did.
|
| Issue has been open for over a year.
|
| https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I just wish it had a fallback if Vulcan wasn't installed...
| I would love to run Zed inside a docker container so that
| naughty plugins don't misbehave
| minzi wrote:
| Its agent is a lot worse than Cursor's in my experience so far.
| Even tab edits feel worse.
|
| My understanding is that these are not custom models but a
| combination of prompting and steering. That makes Cursor's
| performance relative to others pretty surprising to me. Are
| they just making more requests? I wonder what the secret sauce
| is.
| badmonster wrote:
| Congrats void!!
| simultsop wrote:
| The branding looks quiet strange and very conflicting with
| voidzero.dev
| ahamilton454 wrote:
| The irony of an open source alternative to a fork of an open
| source project is hopefully not lost here
| wg0 wrote:
| And just that much maot each AI wrapper has.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Here have 10B$
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Would be helpful for you to be in homebrew.
| hoakiet98 wrote:
| Been following this project from very earlier on. It's awesome to
| see how much ground you covered in just a few months!
| _pdp_ wrote:
| On a tangent, I get the feeling that the more senior you are, the
| less likely you are to end up using one of these VIDEs. If you do
| use any coding assistants at all, it will mostly be for the auto-
| complete feature - no 'agent mode' malarkey.
|
| Would you say this is true?
| codybontecou wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but the auto-complete is very distracting
| and something I avoid. Most of the time I'm fighting it,
| deleting or denying it's suggestions, and it throws me out of
| flow.
|
| From what I've seen, most senior/staff-level engineers are
| working for big corps which have limited contracts with
| providers like Github Copilot, which until recently only gave
| access to autocomplete.
|
| I prefer the web-based interface. It feels like my choice to
| reference a tool. It's easy to run multiple chats at once,
| running prompts against multiple models.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| That's very interesting. This is certainly what I was doing
| before Copilot. Now I let it autocomplete but only sometimes
| when it makes sense. I guess I am used to the keybinds so
| that I can undo if I don't like it.
|
| When I was reading your comment I thought that there is a
| space for an out-of-flow coding assistant, i.e. rather than
| deploy an entire IDE with extension, the assistant can be
| just a floating window (I guess chatgpt does that) and is
| able to dive in and out or just suggest as you type along.
| rgoulter wrote:
| When browsing a GitHub repo, there's an option for "assistive
| chat" with copilot. -- I've found this a useful interface to
| get the LLM to answer quick questions about the repository
| without having to dig through myself.
|
| Beyond autocomplete, I've found the LLM to be useful in some
| cases: sometimes you'll want to make edits which are quite
| automatic, but can't quite be covered by refactoring tools, and
| are a bit more involved than search/replace. LLMs can handle
| that quite well.
|
| For unfamiliar domains, it's also useful to be able to ask an
| LLM to troubleshoot / identify problems in code.
| didip wrote:
| Can you tell me what's the difference between this and Continue?
| asynchronousx wrote:
| If this supports connecting with locally hosted models this is
| actually a HUGE deal
| l-albertovich wrote:
| I've just installed it and tried to have it create a hello world
| using gemma3:27b-it-qat through ollama but it refused to do it
| claiming it doesn't have access to my filesystem.
|
| Then I opened an existing file and asked it to modify a function
| to return a fixed value and it did the same.
|
| I'm an absolute newb in this space so if I'm doing something
| stupid I'd appreciate it if you helped me correct it because I
| already had the C/C++ extension complain that it can only be used
| in "proper vscode" (I imported my settings from vscode using the
| wizard) and when this didn't work either it didn't spark joy as
| Marie Kondo would say.
|
| Please don't get me wrong, I gave this a try because I like the
| idea of having a proper local open source IDE where I can run my
| own models (even if it's slower) and have control over my data.
| I'm genuinely interested in making this work.
|
| Thanks!
| andrewpareles wrote:
| Thanks for writing! Can you try mentioning the file with "@"?
| Smaller models sometimes don't realize that they should look
| for files and folders, but "@" always gives the full context of
| whatever is in the file/folder directly to them.
|
| Small OSS models are going to get better at this when there's
| more of a focus on tool-use, which we're expecting in the next
| iteration of models.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| That's what happen? Also happens with cascade base when using
| windsurf, need a ./ Prefix for it to get the file
| renjimen wrote:
| As a data scientist, my main gripe with all these AI-centric IDEs
| is that they don't provide data centric tools for exploring
| complex data structures inherent to data science. AI cannot tell
| me about my data, only my code.
|
| I'll be sticking with VSCode until:
|
| - Notebooks are first class objects. I develop Python packages
| but notebooks are essential for scratch work in data centric
| workflows
|
| - I can explore at least 2D data structures interactively
| (including parquet). The Data Wrangler in VSCode is great for
| this
| 3abiton wrote:
| I saw recently a framework that was interacting directly with
| notebook. But I forgot what was it. Everyday there is a new
| thing.
| sach1 wrote:
| How is it that the open source Cursor 'alternative' doesn't have
| a linux option (either via AppImage, as Cursor offers, or
| something like a flatpak). I understand that open source does not
| automatically mean linux, but it is like, weird right?
| Timwi wrote:
| No, not really. It's not really your place to dictate what
| someone enjoys working on.
| sach1 wrote:
| That's a bit aggressive. Who hurt you?
| amytimed wrote:
| just looked and it does
| https://github.com/voideditor/binaries/releases
|
| AppImage, .deb, .tar.gz
| sach1 wrote:
| Aw sweet, I only checked their website download page and
| missed that. Thank you!
| branon wrote:
| Disappointing name! You are colliding with https://voidlinux.org/
| among probably many other much more significant pieces of
| software.
| helsinki wrote:
| If this isn't as good as or better than Avante.nvim, I'm going to
| be quite sad.
| almosthere wrote:
| We gotta stop making full vscodes, and just make extensions...
| Bleh
| ez8 wrote:
| Make it disable all the telemetry by default
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| no linux version? pfft. rookies
| bhuga wrote:
| There's so much happening in this space, but I still haven't seen
| what would be the killer feature for me: dual-mode operation in
| IDE and CLI.
|
| In a project where I already have a lot of linting brought into
| the editor, I want to be able to reuse that linting in a headless
| mode: start something at the CLI, then hop into the IDE when it
| says it's done or needs help. I'd be able to see the conversation
| up to that point and the agent would be able to see my linting
| errors before I start using it in the IDE. For a large, existing
| codebase that will require a lot of guardrails for an agent to be
| successful, it's disheartening to imagine splitting customization
| efforts between separate CLI and IDE tools.
|
| For me so far, cursor's still the state of the art. But it's hard
| to go all-in on it if I'll also have to go all-in on a CLI system
| in parallel. Do any of the tools that are coming out have the
| kind of dual-mode operation I'm interested in? There's so many
| it's hard to even evaluate them all.
| echelon wrote:
| I posted this the other day, but didn't get a response:
|
| Does anyone think this model of "tool" + "curated model
| aggregator" + "open source" would be useful for other, non-
| developer fields? For instance, would an AI art tool with
| sculpting and drawing benefit from being open source?
|
| I've talked with VCs that love open source developer tools, but
| they seem to hate on the idea of "open creative tools" for
| designers, illustrators, filmmakers, and other creatives. They
| say these folks don't benefit from open source. I don't quite
| get it, because Blender and Krita have millions of users.
| (ComfyUI is already kind of in that space, it's just not very
| user-friendly.)
|
| Why do investors seem to want non-developer things to be closed
| source? Are they right?
| bix6 wrote:
| I think it's mostly a value capture thing. More money to be
| made hooking devs in then broke creatives and failing studios
| (no offense, it just seems like creatives are getting crushed
| right now). In one case you're building for the tech
| ecosystem, in the other for the arts. VC will favor tech,
| higher multiples. Closed source is more protected from theft
| etc in many cases.
|
| But as you point out there are great solutions so it's
| clearly not a dead end path.
| pacoxu2025 wrote:
| https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim/ is another choice.
| mdrzn wrote:
| I mostly use Cursor for the monthly flat pricing which allows me
| unlimited (slow) calls to most LLMs (Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7,
| etc) without worrying about spending anything more than
| $20/month.
| welder wrote:
| I bet OpenAI feels kinda silly now that they just paid $3B for
| Windsurf when they could have backed an OSS one for much less.
| sumedh wrote:
| Windsurf probably has recurring revenue.
| exe34 wrote:
| Has anyone had success running it on NixOS? I have an account
| with deepinfra which I'd like to try with this.
|
| Sadly when I try to add a model, I get the error: > Error while
| encrypting the text provided to safeStorage.encryptString.
| Encryption is not available
|
| vscode and Cursor work perfectly fine this way:
|
| > nix-shell -p appimage-run > [nix-shell:~/Downloads]$ appimage-
| run Cursor-0.49.6-x86_64.AppImage
| figmert wrote:
| Side note: is there an AI app that sets up a full initial SaaS
| app based on prompts? I'm struggling to get something like Cursor
| to behave correctly.
| slig wrote:
| Not exactly what you're asking but: have you tried some
| Boilerplate SaaS thing?
| ch1234 wrote:
| What products are in this space?
| slig wrote:
| There are tons. You can look up "saas boilerplate
| $your_stack".
| underlines wrote:
| vibe coding oriented builders, where you draft an app idea and
| it gives you a prototype?
|
| I'd say Firebase Studio and OpenHands
| maouida wrote:
| What we need is not an editor. We need a coding agent server
| which we can use from any editor we want.
| terhechte wrote:
| There's aider (https://aider.chat) or Claude Code
| (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/overview) or
| Codex (https://github.com/openai/codex) or plandex
| (https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex) or kwaak
| (https://github.com/bosun-ai/kwaak)
|
| I'd venture to say there's more of these than there are UI
| Editors tbh.
| underlines wrote:
| I wonder why most agentic patterns don't use multiple different
| retrieval strategies simultaneously and why most of them don't
| use CodeGraph 1 during discovery phase. Embeddings aren't enough,
| Agent induced function/class name search isn't enough.
|
| [1] CodeGraph https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13863
| underlines wrote:
| We need an Eval Leaderboard for LLM assisted Agentic IDEs. The
| space is getting crowded:
|
| New Editors:
|
| - Firebase Studio
|
| - Zed
|
| - OpenHands (OSS Devin Clone)
|
| VS Code Forks:
|
| - Cursor
|
| - Windsurf Editor
|
| - Void
|
| VS Code Extensions:
|
| - Gemini Code Assist
|
| - Continue.dev
|
| - GitHub Copilot Agent Mode
|
| - Cline
|
| - RooCode
|
| - Kilo Code (RooCode + Cline Fork)
|
| - Windsurf Plugin
|
| - Kodu.ai Claude Coder (not claude code!)
|
| Terminal Agents:
|
| - Aider
|
| - Claude Code
|
| - OpenAI codex
|
| Issue Fixing Agents:
|
| - SWE-agent
| paradite wrote:
| Missing OpenAI Codex cli
|
| Also missing a class of non-IDE desktop apps like 16x Prompt
| and Repo Prompt.
| underlines wrote:
| Thanks. I added codex.
|
| Though, since I specifically mentioned agentic, I wanted to
| exclude non-agentic tools like prompt builders and context
| managers that you linked. :)
|
| Reason being: my idea of agents is to generalize well enough,
| so the need for workflow based apps isn't needed anymore.
|
| During discovery and planning phase, the agents should
| traverse the code base with a retrieval strategy packaged as
| a tool (embedded search, code-graphs, ...) and then add that
| new knowledge to the plan before executing the code changes.
| paradite wrote:
| I don't think it's a black and white distinction between
| agentic and non-agentic tools. Not to mention tools are
| constantly evolving and changing.
|
| For example, Cursor a year ago was not agentic at all.
| GitHub Copilot only recently added agentic features.
|
| I also think the end game for an agentic tool would not an
| IDE, because IDE was designed for human workflows, not
| agents.
|
| I wrote about this topic a while ago and made a
| classification that's probably a bit outdated, but still
| relevant: https://prompt.16x.engineer/blog/ai-coding-l1-l5
| pzo wrote:
| There is also Trae - vscode fork from bytedance
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| JetBrains Junie
| jaggs wrote:
| Really interesting from a 'in a bubble' point of view. I've been
| using Void for the past few weeks as a replacement for Bolt,
| Lovable, Tempo and the rest. Which is nothing like the use cases
| mentioned in this thread. Just shows how we're each focused on
| different parts of an environment? Of course I'm not a
| programmer, I'm just a slash-and-hack vibe coder. :)
|
| For the record, I really like Void. It's great at utilising local
| models, which no-one else does. Although I'd love to know which
| are the best Ollama local coding models. I've failed with a few
| so the moment I'm sticking to Sonnet 3.7 and GPT 4.1. With 03 as
| the 'big daddy'. :)
|
| I'm also a fan because it's open source, which is really needed
| in this space I feel. One question for the devs, what do you
| think about this? https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/vs-code-forks-are-
| facing-a-grim
| orange_puff wrote:
| As others have mentioned please add more docs / details to the
| README
|
| I want to mention my current frustration with cursor recently and
| why I would love an OSS alternative that gives me control; I feel
| cursor has dumped agentic capabilities everywhere, regardless of
| whether the user wants it or not. When I use the Ask function as
| opposed to Agent, it seems to still be functioning in an agentic
| loop. It takes longer to have basic conversations about high
| level ideas and really kills my experience.
|
| I hope void doesn't become an agent dumping ground where this
| behavior is thrust upon the user as much as possible
|
| Not to say I dislike agent mode, but I like to choose when I use
| it.
| Singletoned wrote:
| I think it's really interesting that Void (and Zed) are both much
| more tastefully designed than Cursor, Windsurf or VSCode (though
| I wouldn't have expected VSCode to be well designed)
| chathaway123 wrote:
| Not sure if this feedback is useful but I personally tried Void
| this morning for about 10 mins on a flutter project (after
| connecting all the various extensions and keys, which was
| completely painless).
|
| However, I uninstalled due to the sounds it made! A constant
| clicking for some (unannounced) background work is bizarre choice
| for any serious development environment.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| Something I was thinking -- if Microsoft keeps locking things
| down for forks (which they sorta are), I wonder if the Void devs
| would ever pivot to forking other editors like Zed, or if they're
| just gonna keep charging headfirst into the wave.
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