Show HN: Aide, an open-source AI native IDE

Thats a fair point, a significant part of our 4 person team had to skill up on the VSCode codebase to be able to meaningfully make changes to it.

I would love to know your workflow, you mention CLI tool or VSCode plugin, which one of them work for you? Whats missing from them where Aide can fill in the gap

fork was necessary for the UX we wanted to go for. I do agree that an extension can also satisfy your needs (and it clearly is in your case)

Having a deeper integration with the editor allows for some really nice paradigms: - Rollbacks feel more native, in the sense that I do not loose my undo or redo stack - cmd+k is more in line with what you would expect with a floating widget for input instead of it being shown at the very top of your screen which is the case with any extension for now.

Going further, the changes which Microsoft are making to enable copilot editing features are only open to "copilot-chat" and no other extension (fair game for Microsoft IMHO) So keeping these things in mind, we designed the architecture in a way that we can go towards any interface (editor/extension). We did put energy into making this work deeply with the VSCode ecosystem of APIs and also added our own.

If the editor does not work to our benefit, we will take a call on moving to a different interface and thats where an extension or cloud based solution might also make sense

After using Cursor (another AI focused fork) I'm 100% on the fork train. AI built natively into the IDE presents another layer of speed and isn't subject to the limitations of the extension system (which is awesome in its own right, not a knock on it).

you missed this one https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar Sidecar: The AI brains Aide: https://github.com/codestoryai/aide the editor

we don't .. in your user settings, type in disable all telemetry and we won't see a thing

There are quite a few things! VSCode's direction (I am making my own assumptions from the learnings I have) - VSCode is working on the working set direction of making multi-file edits work - Their idea of bringing in other extension is via the provider API which only copilot has access to (so you can't use them if you are not a copilot subscriber)

So just taking these things for face value, I think there is lots to innovate. No editor (bias view of mine) has really captured the idea of a pair programmer working alongside you. Even now the most beloved feature is copilot or cursor tab with the inline completions.

So we are ways further from a saturated market or even a feature set level saturation. Until we get there, I do think forks have a way to work towards their own version of an ideal AI native editor, I do think the editors of the future will look different given the upwards trend of AI abilities.

Betting on Microsoft messing up on UX side, as always.

Yes there is, we have the binary link on our website but putting it here:

- arm64 build: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/download/1....

- x86 build: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/download/1....

> There's such a difference in feel that may be rooted in a philosophy, but boils down to how much the creator's vision aligns with my own.

Hard agree! I do think AI will find its way into our productivity tool kit in different ways. There are still so many ways we can go about doing this, A:B comparison aside I do feel the giving people to power to mold the tool to work for themselves is the right way.

VSCode forks are not new, there are many companies out there building towards this vision. What sets us apart is partly our philosophy (deeply integrating into the editor) and also the tech stack (running everything to the dot locally) and giving developers control over the LLM usage and also other niceness (like rollbacks which I think are paramount and important)

Aide seems to have a good open source license (Cursor is proprietary)

Yes, it is! https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar

yeah bad edits are especially worse when we keep building on top of it.

Our first take on solving this is with rollbacks .. which allows you to delete edits up until a point in the conversation.. so if you do notice a bad edit you can do that.

after this, there is the proactive agent ..which checks it's work again and suggests more changes which it needs to do .. you can give feedback and guide it.

With llms we do loose a bit of control but I think the editor should work to solve this

Oh for sure! I do want to talk about how rust really helped us so many times when doing refactors or building new features, part of the reason why we were able to iterate so quickly on the AI side of things and ship features

I also use helix and i've been getting some mileage out of aider, the cli tool. Confusing name, as I don't believe aider is affiliated with aide

hmm.... I do think it can be extended to work outside of just the VSCode environment.

If you look at the sidecar side of things: https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar/blob/ba20fb3596c71186... these are the main APIs we use

On the editor side: https://github.com/codestoryai/ide/blob/0eb311b7e4d7d63676ad...

These are the access points we need

The binary is fairly agnostic to the environment, so there is a possibility to make it work elsewhere. Its a bit non trivial but I would be happy to brainstorm and talk more about this

There is pinned context on the very top where you can pin the files which you frequently use.

We will start including the open file by default in the context very soon (one of the gotchas here, is that the open file could not be related to the question you have)

RIP, didn't expect that to happen. This is the embedded video btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ZXMgnFSo8 putting it here for prosperity

I would take that as a compliment, big fan of Zed (I hope their extension ecosystem allows for us to plugin sidecar into Zed soon)

Tbh I did try out their implementation and it still feels early, one of the key difference we went for was to allow the user to move freely between chat and editing mode.

They can from the openvsx store https://open-vsx.org/

We also import your extensions automatically (safe guarding against the ones with Microsoft's licensed)

You can also just download in from the vscode marketplace webpage and drag and drop it in

you should be able to use this: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/download/1.... let me know if that does not work.

All our binaries are listed out here: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/tag/1.94.2....

wooops... on it (we got rate limited by Github) in the meanwhile https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/tag/1.94.2.... check this out

Thanks for your interest in Aide!

If I understood that correctly, it would mean supporting Claude via the AWS Bedrock endpoint, we will make that happen.

If the underlying LLM does not change then adding more connectors is pretty easy, I will ping the thread with updates on this.

Honestly we can, I haven't prompted it enough what do you want to use the model for?

AIDE == AI + IDE (that was our take on the name)

I know... we could have built something free form ground up (like zed did) but we had to pick a battle between building a new editor from the grounds up or building from a solid foundation (VSCode) We are a small team right now (4 of us) and have been users of VSCode, so instead of building something new, putting energy into building from VSCode made a lot more sense to us.

I used Cursor for many months, but found that I couldn't deal with how slow and workflow-interrupting VSCode feels, so I went back to Zed.

I tried out and abandoned Zed AI, but I've found that Zed + aider is a really excellent setup – for me, at least.

For smaller things, Zed's inline Copilot setup works (nowadays) just as well as Cursor's and for things that are even a little bigger than tiny, I pull up aider and prompt the change the exact same way that I did with Cursor's Composer before.

I'm an odd choice because I'm a pretty expert-level programmer, but I find that aider with o1 is helpful for things hairy, expansive and tedious things that would otherwise irritate.

You can try Cline and Aider.

TIL, I thought we covered the ground when grepping for Aide. Funny that its also an editor

Looks rather dead.

I tried Cursor and found it annoying. I don’t really like talking to AI in IDE chat windows. For whatever reason, I really prefer a web browser. I also didn’t like the overall experience.

I’m still using Copilot in VS Code every day. I recently switched from OpenAI to Claude for the browser-based chat stuff and I really like it. The UI for coding assistance in Claude is excellent. Very well thought out.

Claude also has a nice feature called Projects where you can upload a bunch of stuff to build context which is great - so for instance if you are doing an API integration you can dump all the API docs into the project and then every chat you have has that context available.

As with all the AI tools you have to be quite careful. I do find that errors slip into my code more easily when I am not writing it all myself. Reading (or worse, skimming) source code is just different than writing it. However, between type safety and unit testing, I find I get rid of the bugs pretty quickly and overall my productivity is multiples of what it was before.

I am on day 8 of Cursor's 14-day trial. If things continue to go well, I will be switching from Webstorm to Cursor for my Typescript projects.

The AI integrations are a huge productivity boost. There is a substantial difference in the quality of the AI suggestions between using Claude on the side, and having Claude be deeply integrated in the codebase.

I think I accepted about 60-70% of the suggestions Cursor provided.

Some highlights of Cursor:

- Wrote about 80% of a Vite plugin for consolidating articles in my blog (built on remix.run)

- Wrote a Github Action for automated deployments. Using Cursor to write automation scripts is a tangible productivity boost.

- Made meaningful alterations to a libpg_query fork that allowed it to be cross-compiled to iOS. I have very little experience with C compilation, it would have taken me a substantially long time to figure this out.

There are some downsides to using Cursor though:

- Cursor can get too eager with its suggestions, and I'm not seeing any easy way to temporarily or conditionally turn them off. This was especially bad when I was writing blog posts.

- Cursor does really well with Bash and Typescript, but does not work very well with Kotlin or Swift.

- This is a personal thing, but I'm still not used to some of the shortcuts that Cursor uses (Cursor is built on top of VSCode).

It really depends on what you're doing. AI is great for generating a ton of text at once but only a small subset of programming tasks clearly benefit from this.

Outside of this it's an autocomplete that's generally 2/3rds incorrect. If you keep coding as you normally do and accept correct solutions as they appear you'll see a few percentage productivity increase.

For highly regular patterns you'll see a drastically improved productivity increase. Sadly this is also a small subset of the programming space.

One exception might be translating user stories into unit tests, but I'm waiting for positive feedback to declare this.

I can give my broader feedback: - Codegen tools today are still not great: The lack of context and not using LSP really burns down the quality of the generated code. - Autocomplete is great Autocomplete is pretty nice, IMHO it helps finish your thoughts and code faster, its like intellisense but better.

If you are working on a greenfield project, AI codegen really shines today and there are many tools in the market for that.

With Aide, we wanted it to work for engineers who spend >= 6 months on the same project and there are deep dependencies between classes/files and the project overall.

For quick answers, I have a renewed habit of going to o1-preview or sonnet3.5 and then fact checking that with google (not been to stack overflow in a long while now)

Do give AI coding a chance, I think you will be excited to say the least for the coming future and develop habits on how to best use the tool.

I'm using Copilot in VScode every day, it works fine, but I mostly use it as glorified one-line autocomplete. I almost never accept multi-line suggestions, don't even look at them.

I tried to use AI deeper, like using aider, but so far I just don't like it. I'm very sensitive to the tiny details of code and AI almost never got it right. I guess actually the main reason that I don't like AI is that I love to write code, simple as that. I don't want to automate that part of my work. I'm fine with trivial autocompletes, but I'm not fine with releasing control over the entire code.

What I would love is to automate interaction with other humans. I don't want to talk to colleagues, boss or other people. I want AI to do so and present me some short extracts.

GitHub Copilot in either VS Code or JetBrains IDEs. Having more or less the same experience across multiple tools is lovely and meets me where I am, instead of making me get a new tool.

The chat is okay, the autocomplete is also really pleasant for snippets and anything boilerplate heavy. The context awareness also helps. No advanced features like creating entirely new structures of files, though.

Of course, I’ll probably explore additional tools in the future, but for now LLMs are useful in my coding and also sometimes help me figure out what I should Google, because nowadays seemingly accurate search terms return trash.

Cursor works amazing day to day. Copilot is not even comparable there. I like but rarely use aider and plandex. I'd use them more if the interface didn't take me completely away from the ide. Currently they're closer to "work on this while I'm taking a break".

I was deep into AI coding experiments since last December before all the VS Code Extensions and IDEs came out.

I wrote a few scripts to get to a semi-automated workflow where I have control over the source code context and code editing portion, because I believe I can do a better than AI in those areas.

Eventually I built my own desktop app which is 16x Prompt: https://prompt.16x.engineer/

I'm still copy/pasting between VS.Code and ChatGPT. I just don't want to invest/commit yet because this workflow is good enough for me. It lets me chat design, architecture, UX, product in the same context as the code which I find helpful.

Pros

- Only one subscription needed

- Very simple

- Highly flexible/adaptive to what part of workflow I'm in

Cons

- More legwork

- Copy/pasting sometimes results in errors due to incomplete context

I've been building and using these tools for well more than a year now, so here's my journey on building and using them (ORDER BY DESC datetime).

(1) My view now (Nov 2024) is that code building is very conversational and iterative. You need to be able to tweak aspects of generated code by talking to the LLM. For example: "Can you use a params object instead of individual parameters in addToCart?". You also need the ability to sync generated code into your project, run it, and pipe any errors back into the model for refinement. So basically, a very incremental approach to writing it.

For this I made a Chrome plugin, which allowed ChatGPT and Claude to edit source code (using Chrome's File System APIs). You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHzqlI6LLp8

The code is here, but its WIP and for very early users; so please don't give negative reviews yet: https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin-chrome-extension

(2) Earlier this year, I thought I should build a VS Code plugin. It actually works quite well, allows you to edit code without leaving VSCode. It does stuff like adding dependencies, model selection, prompt histories, sharing git diffs etc. Towards the end, I was convinced that edits need to be conversations, and hence I don't use it as much these days.

Link: https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin-vscode-extension

(3) Prior to that (2023), I built this same thing in CLI. The idea was that you'd include prompt files in your project, and say something like `my-magical-tool gen prompt.md`. Code would be mostly written as markdown prompt files, and almost never edited directly. In the end, I felt that some form of IDE integration is required - which led to the VSCode extension above.

Link: https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin

All of these tools were primarily built with AI. So these are not hypotheticals. In addition, I've built half a dozen projects with it; some of it code running in production and hobby stuff like webjsx.org.

Basically, my takeaway is this: code editing is conversational. You need to design a project to be AI-friendly, which means smaller, modular code which can be easily understood by LLMs. Also, my way of using AI is not auto-complete based; I prefer generating from higher level inputs spanning multiple files.

Besides Claude.vim for "AI pair programming"? :) (tbh it works well only for small things)

I'm using Codeium and it's pretty decent at picking up the right context automatically, usually it autocompletes within ~100kLoC project quite flawlessly. (So far I haven't been using the chat much, just autocomplete.)

I never got the appeal of having the AI directly in your editor, I've tried Copilot and whatever JetBrains are calling their assistant and I found it mostly just got in the way. So for me it's no AI in editor and ChatGPT in a browser for when I do need some help.

VS Code plugins. Codeium at home. GitHub Copilot at work. Botb are good. Probably equivalent.

Codeium recently pushed annoying update that limits your ctrl-I prompt to one line and is lost if you lose focus eg to check another file. There is a GH issue for that.

cursor works well - uses RAG on your code to give context, can directly reference latest docs of whatever you're using

not perfect but good to incrementally build things/find bugs

Neovim + CopilotChat + CopilotLSP + Copilot subscription. You can dump your context, autocomplete, chat and select Claude or O1. Best deal so far.

what does the AI coding setup of the HN community look like

GitHub copilot and copilot chat in Jetbrains IDE. Cut and paste to Claude for anything else.

Using cursor and it’s been great !

Founders care about development experience a lot and it shows.

Yet to try others, but already satisfied so not required.

Vscode + cline + openrouter using claude sonnet 3.5 20241022 model it's unreal the shit it can do

I tried GH copilot again recently with Claude. It was complete shit. Dog slow and gave incomplete responses. Back to aider.

I ... did not know that.

We should probably pick another name then

I don't think it's going to take us 200 years to kick the habit of using global namespaces for friendly names, maybe 80. Recognizing a name and rendering it as a disambiguation based on my location in the trust graph should be a feature of the text box, not something that I have to think about.

sounds like the scene in movie Idiocracy where roomba is stuck in corner and keeps repeating 'floor is now clean'.

hahaha

There are download links for other platforms at the footer, and below the main CTA button says "Looking for other platforms?" which takes you there.

It supports all platforms, we took inspiration from the macos spotlight search widget for inline editing.