[andrewpareles]

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.

[nico]

> 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]

And Emacs, also mentioned in that thread (by me, but still).

[swyx]

this joke could not have been more perfectly set up if it were staged. thanks for the guffaw.

[_kidlike]

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]

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.

[jjani]

> 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.

[andrewpareles]

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.

[opdahl]

> 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.

[fuzzythinker]

I don't know Claude Code, so if it's "neither IDE nor extension", what is it?

[bglusman]

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

[andrewpareles]

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.

[danenania]

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

[jmvldz]

I agree the branching sounds super cool!

[elAhmo]

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]

Continue is doing great work, but they're an extension (plugin)!

[vunderba]

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]

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)

[lnxg33k1]

>> 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

[SegmentTree]

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]

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.

[huevosabio]

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]

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.

[jeron]

openAI chose to acquire windsurf for 3B instead of building something like Void, very curious decision. awesome project, will be closely following this