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.
And Emacs, also mentioned in that thread (by me, but still).
this joke could not have been more perfectly set up if it were staged. thanks for the guffaw.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I don't know Claude Code, so if it's "neither IDE nor extension", what is it?
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
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.
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
I agree the branching sounds super cool!
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.
Continue is doing great work, but they're an extension (plugin)!
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).
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)
>> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
openAI chose to acquire windsurf for 3B instead of building something like Void, very curious decision. awesome project, will be closely following this
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.
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”.
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.
"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.
If you use AI agents for all your work as a novice do you ever make it out of the valley?
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)
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.
kind of ironic, because the novices are the ones that absolutely should be doing things by hand to get better at the craft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My main interest in agent mode is deputizing the C++ compiler to tell the LLM about everything it has hallucinated.
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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.
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/)
When can we expect a release from Engines?
> 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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
This is cool! I like that you have a visual element for the agent working on multiple tickets at a time.
You forgot the best one to compare against - Claude Code.
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.
The difference is this one is backed by Y Combinator.
Does this mean "open source" is really "market capture before becoming closed-source"?