Have you considered this one: https://github.com/continuedev/continue

I tried it a while back and had a lot of trouble getting it to work, it's on my list to try again. I also tried Sourcegraph's Cody and just constant errors even after paying for the Pro plan so now I'm back on Copilot.

Hey, product manager from sourcegraph here. Sorry to hear you got errors. What were the errors, and where were you using Cody (VS Code, Web, or JetBrains)?

JetBrains IDEA. Here is at least one of the errors I got:

https://github.com/sourcegraph/jetbrains/issues/1306

Gotcha. Our JetBrains IDE has improved a lot since then, we've been focusing a ton on making performance better. If you could, would love to get you trying Cody again! I can even throw in 1 month free for you, I think I see your customer profile in Stripe :)

Tried to setup it up with intellij. Absolutely infuriating experience trying to get it to connect to a model. No error messages or info.

Really wouldn't recommend this in its current state.

I didn't realise Continue had a Jetbrains IDE plugin. Neat! Going to give it a go.

I used this while Cursor was broken (Pylance problems), but Continue's code replace tooling sometimes will delete huge swaths of adjacent code. I've filed a comprehensive ticket in their repo and they're working on it, but I've been able to reproduce the problem recently.

I think it has to do with Cursor's much better custom small models for code search/replace, but can't be sure.

I just tried it, has some bugs and feels unpolished, but it works for Jetbrains, which is a game changer for me too

they're out there; https://github.com/s-kostyaev/ellama/blob/main/ellama.el for example.

Nice, there is also gptel https://github.com/karthink/gptel

both good authors, too.

Anyone aware of one supporting suggestions? I.e. the possibility to accept/decline LLM-suggested changes point by point?

Jetbrains have their own AI.

There is also https://codeium.com/jetbrains_tutorial I have been using the free tier of it for half a year, and quite like it.

Supermaven has https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/23893-supermaven also good free tier. (Although they recently got investment to make their own editor.)

Really? Jetbrains has their own AI? Their terms seem to indicate that they use 3rd party models. https://www.jetbrains.com/legal/docs/terms/jetbrains-ai/serv...

> Full Line code completion runs entirely on your local device without sending any code over the internet. (1)

They are executed locally, and you can find the local model files if you look hard enough (2).

(AI Assistant is different, costs extra and runs over the network; but you dont have to use it)

[1] - https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/full-line-code-completio... [2] - https://gist.github.com/WarningImHack3r/2a38bb66d69fb5e7acd8...

I tried a bunch of things, and their local line-completion is so far the only AI that didn’t quickly annoy me enough to turn it off again.

One thing I noticed though is that when autocompleting C++ statements like if or while it will add only the opening curly braces which is a bit annoying but makes sense. But it also sometimes adds them @_@

Even if you use vscode, they want you to use a vscode fork... Why not just make a vscode plugin?

Continue.dev's plugin is as close as it gets for Cursor, but there are clearly limitations to a VSCode plugin when it comes to the inline editing and code search/replace - made a comment above about it.

Only if you could commit the changes in the browser and pull locally?

Replit with AI support is web based and has GitHub integration.

I feel the exact same! I built this tool to make it much easier for me to bring LLMs into existing workflows: https://github.com/gr-b/repogather

It helps find relevant content to copy to your clipboard (or just copies all files in the repo, with exclusions like gitignore attended to) so you can paste everything into Claude. With the large context sizes, I’ve found that I get way better answers / code edits by dumping as much context as possible (and just starting a new chat with each question).

It’s funny, Anthropic is surely losing money on me from this, and I use gpt-mini via api to compute the relevancy ratings, so OpenAI is making money off me, despite having (in my opinion) an inferior coding LLM / UI.

I’ve done something similar, but with a TUI to select files/directories as well as search!

https://github.com/patricktrainer/pbtree

I do something similar with a script. Don’t know if anything about my approach could improve yours, but I’m also curious if you have any suggestions?

- Mine prepends the result with the output of running `tree -I node_modules --noreport` before any other content. This informs the LLM of the structure of the project, which leads to other insights like it will know which frameworks and paradigms your project uses without you needing to explain that stuff. - Mine prepends the contents of each included file with “Contents of relative/path/to/file/from/root/of/project/filename.ts:” to reinforce the context and the file’s position in the tree.

Tabnine has an IDEA plugin. It's not quite as good as Cursor, in my opinion, but it's better to have Tabnine and IDEA than Cursor and VSCode.

It started out as just predictive text, but now it has a chatbot window that you can access GPT, Claude, etc. from, as well as their own model which has better assurances about code privacy.

I have started using Claude Dev (an extension for VSCode - https://github.com/saoudrizwan/claude-dev), and so far my impression has been very positive. It’s a full blown code agent that looks for relevant files in the code base, can ask you to run commands and modify files etc. You use your own Anthropic API key or self hosted model.

Sounds a little like aider.chat

It is quite similar but I found aider a bit clunky to use in that it creates a new commit with a huge message being the whole conversation and context. Which can be a good thing of course, but for most things I'd rather accumulate changes until a feature is finished, then I commit.

I think the default is not to do this anymore (at least the whole convo and chat aren't in the commit). It is strangely scary to have it commit on every change, even if that's probably objectively the right thing for it to do (so you can roll back, so that commits are atomic, etc, etc).

I remember that... but I think it's changed now.

Aider remains to me one of the places where innovation happens and it seems to end up in other places. Their new feature to architect with o1 and then code with sonnet is pretty trippy.

Only can run so many IDEs at a time though.

This feature: https://aider.chat/2024/09/26/architect.html

It's great!

Just work on a branch and squash.

I use aider with the --no-auto-commits flag. Then review code and do manual edits in VSCode, as well as manual git process. It achieves exactly what you're saying.

aider --sonnet --no-auto-commits --cache-prompts --no-stream --cache-keepalive-pings 5 --no-suggest-shell-commands`

This is a great tip, appreciate it

Are there any great AI plug-ins anyone recommends for Sublime Text?

For me it's still the cleanest editor.

VS Code is way too cluttered to be my daily driver for basic editing.

Is the zed-editor not too cluttered for you?

If not, it has some ai support.

Claude Dev does have a really nice UI nailed down. I was not aware that you could run local models yourself with it, which would be a great feature but kind of obviates the name.

Likely because ~70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from ChatGPT Plus/Teams/Enterprise. Model access is just not as profitable, so slapping on features to encourage upgrades is their best path forward.

It’s not great:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

I mean… thats just what an IDE is. Integrated. Existing IDEs can integrate models via plugins or they can build new IDEs with first party support.

The problem is that tacking on to an existing product, while the ideal approach, limits just how creative you can get. I believe this is one of the reasons Cursor had to fork VSCode. Simply being an extension limited the features they could build.

Emacs has none of these problems :p

True. I have been very happy using ellama.

The other problem is IDEs are incentivized to build their own AI coding tools instead of letting other people plug in

IDEA allows you to customize the UI quite a bit, has plugin hooks specifically for AI tools, and has several 3rd party plugins already.

None of these points seem to apply..

They're still selling their yearly subscription even if they can't upsell me on an AI subscription

Solid point. We’re building in a space adjacent to this and it definitely feels hard to balance removing friction for adoption and delivering everything we want.

Okay, but why does what you want matter?

I find a lot of teams are so focused on their vision that they fail to integrate their tool into my workflow. So I don’t use them at all.

That’s fine for art, but I don’t need opinionated tools.

Who said what we want has anything to do with our vision. Please don’t make assumptions about what drives our product development.

What I want in a product comes from customer interviews. It’s not “my opinion” other than perhaps our team’s interpretation of customer requests. A customer can want certain pain points addressed and have friction to move to a particular solution at the same time.

Or does wanting a product that meets customer needs too opinionated?

I completely get this and I don’t have a good answer to the issue. I almost wish I liked VSCode since almost all AI editors are forks of that (not sure what the extension compatibility story is), but prefer IDEA.

> (not sure what the extension compatibility story is)

So far I've had all the vscode extensions just work in cursor (including devcontainers, docker, etc.) I hope it continues like this, as breaking extensions is something that would take away from the usefulness of cursor.

I am also using intelliJ, but have started tinkering with Cursor

My hunch says that IDEA should be worried a lot. If I am on the edge evaluating other tools because of AI assisted programming, lot of others would be doing that too

> but prefer IDEA.

IDEA has "AI Assistant"[^0]. Is it not usable for you (I might have missed your comment mentioning it)?

[^0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/ai-assistant.html

Codeium has extensions for all the major IDEs, including IDEA.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-codeium-ai-autoco...

The best way I've found are aider and Zed editor's ai integration is crazy good. (It lets u delete AI response unlike Cursor AI)

Zed is lightening fast.

Wish it had more features.

I mainly use CLI tools for AI assistance.

I'll use Continue when a chat is all I want to generate some code/script to copy paste in. When I need to prepare a bigger input I'll use the CLI tool in Sophia (sophia.dev) to generate the response.

I use Aider sometimes, less so lately, although it has caught up with some features in Sophia (which builds on top of Aider), being able to compile, and lint, and separating design from the implementation LLM call. With Aider you have to manually add/drop files from the context, which is good for having precise control over which files are included.

I use the code agent in Sophia to build itself a fair bit. It has its own file selection agent, and also a review agent which helps a lot with fixing issues on the initial generated changes.

> AI coding tools want me to use their own editor

Instead of putting the AI in your IDEA, put it in your git repo:

https://aider.chat/

And copilot workspace for people using github.

So, I think that with the agent frameworks that exist now, that wouldn't be very hard to realize. What's needed though would be a full API for the editor that can be tapped into.

Ironically, for creating that, these new age code editor startups would probably have more luck with neovim and it's extensive lua API rather than with vs code. (Of course, the idea with using a vs code fork is about capturing the market share it has).

I am actually building something along these lines, IntelliJ native rather than a second class VS Code follow along. Is this something you (or your company) would pay for? Say $50/year for the plugin and you bring your own API keys?

I would.

This is not an issue. Technology moves forward. You don't adapt, you fall behind. There were other editors and IDE's before the one you use. New devs will use it.

Anyway, I don't use them either. I prefer to use ChatGPT and Claude directly.

Overall I agree with everything you’ve said and I also use ChatGPT and Claude directly. The issue is that:

Good at integrating AI into a text editor != Good at building an IDE.

I worry about the ability for some of these VSCode forks to actually maintain a fork and again, I greatly prefer the power of IDEA. I’ll switch if it becomes necessary, but right now the lack of deep AI integration is not compelling enough to switch since I still have ways of using AI directly (and I have Copilot).

I'm guessing using AI will fundamentally change how IDE even works. Maybe everything IDE's offer right now is not needed when you have a copilot you tell what to do.

I'm a long term vim user. I find all the IDE stuff distracting and noisy. With AI makes it even more noisy. I'm guessing the new generation will just be better at using it. Similar to how we got good at "googling stuff".

My coworkers do just fine with vim.

"past performance is not indicative of future results"

Is it not though? It's not a guarantee but definitely an indication.

Not really. Only thing you can guarantee is things change.

Let’s just throw away all past experience then?

It’s a mistake to assume that there will be 100% correlation between the past and future, but it’s probably as bad of a mistake to assume 0% correlation. (Obviously dependant on exactly what you are looking at).

0% maybe not. But it's the outliers and the didn't see that comings that kill ya. Sometimes literally.

So while the odds at the extremes are low, they cannot be ignored.

No one can predict the future. But those that assume tomorrow will be like today are - per history - going to be fatally wrong eventually.

So the choices are 100% or 0%?

That’s my point – they are not. Your previous comment implied to me a belief that any attempt to draw inference from past events was doomed to failure!

Each circumstance is different. Sometimes the past is a good guide to the future – even for the notoriously unpredictable British weather apparently you can get a seventy percent success rate (by some measure) by predicting that tomorrows weather will be the same as todays. Sometimes it is not - the history of an ideal roulette wheel should offer no insights into future numbers.

The key is of course to act in accordance with the probability, risk and reward.

I did not speak with certainty. Everything I said is guess and opinion.

vim is the "just put your money in an index fund" of text editors

Technology also moves into dead ends. Not every change is progress. You can only tell a posteriori which paths were fruitful and which were not.

Everything ends. Even things you used for a long time.

Almost every program I've used 20 years ago still available today. I think that I switched from Eclipse to Idea like 15 years ago, but Eclipse is still rocking. IT really frozen in 1990s. OS didn't change at all, they just switch fancy colors and border radius every few years. Software is the same, they just add more annoying bugs and useless features, but nothing really changes. I'm still using the same unix shell and unix tools I've used 20 years ago, I'm still greping and seding files around.

Stone tablets and chisel technically still available also.

Falling behind what?

If I knew answer to that question I wouldn't be falling behind

That's cool

So you're just out here wasting my time

See you

This is exactly what OpenAI and other want you to believe. "OH NO, I need to use LLMs for coding otherwise I will fall behind". No, no. Most of what makes a good software engineer cannot be replaced by LLMs. A good software engineer has a deep understanding of the problem space, works on the right things, and elevates their team members by coaching, helping etc. It's not about how fast you type your code.

There's still time to find out if what you say is true

I refuse to believe there were ever editors before vim.

Vim has been around since the Stone Age.

Jokes aside, I don’t really see why ai tools need new editors vs plugins EXCEPT that they don’t want to have to compete with Microsoft’s first party AI offerings in vscode.

It’s just a strategy for lock-in.

An exception may be like zed, which provides a lot of features besides AI integration which require a new editor.

They probably said the same thing when someone created vim, or vi.

Sorry, I’m not understanding what you mean.

Vi and vim were never products sold for a profit.

Who was saying what? And what were they saying?

EDIT: ah I think I understand now.

The thing is, I don’t see any advantage to having AI built into the editor vs having a plug-in. Aider.vim is pretty great, for example.

The only reason to have a dedicated editor is a retention/lock in tactic.

Every time there's a new editor, or anything else, people complain why we need another one. Sometimes that new thing is innovative.

Sure, I just don’t see what an AI first editor would have over vscode, vim, or whatever already exists + an extension.

The editor handles the human to text file interface, handling key inputs, rendering, managing LSPs, providing hooks to plugins, etc. AI coding assistants kind of sits next to sits it just handles generating text.

It’s why many of these editors just fork vscode. All the hard work is already done, they just add lock in as far as I can tell.

Again, zed is an exception in this pack bc of its CRDT and cooperative features. Those are not things you can easily add on to an existing editor.

The icky demo of how much worse /r/LinkedinLunatics is going to get aside: is this the front foot of a globe-spanning, cutting edge research lab at the very efficient frontier of human and machine intelligence?

Or is it yet another lame distraction effort around the abject and embarrassing failure to ship GPT-5?

These people are pretty shameless in ways that range from “exceedingly poor taste” to “interstate wire fraud” depending on your affiliation, but people who ship era-defining models after all the stars bounced they are not.

The primary issue is that IDEA and other editors don’t allow the level of flexibility and customizability needed to make new experiences, unlike VSCode. Whether new solutions need to fork it or not is a different question. For example, Cursor absolutely has made significant changes for user benefit that stock VSCode with Copilot doesn’t have.

I’m a professional IntelliJ plugin developer, this is absolutely not true. IntelliJ is incredibly customisable, and you can always code raw swing to achieve whatever you want if there’s something that the base platform doesn’t provide.

Appreciate the added perspective, I wasn’t aware. But from my usage of IDEA’s product, I’ve yet to find an extension that makes any major changes to the UI/UX? I see them way more often in the VSCode community. In fact, I find the IDEA plugin system incredibly limited overall. Why do you think that’s the case? Or maybe I’ve been in a bubble and you can point to some interesting ones that I’ve maybe missed?

More than it not being possible, it's not regarded as desirable - IntelliJ users greatly value consistency. The fact that the experience is consistent across different languages is one of the things I like best about IntelliJ. Can you give me an idea of the sort of thing that you'd like to see that you haven't seen?

Here's an example of something I recently added (an inline inspector), that my main competitor (VS Code) said wasn't possible with the VS Code APIs: https://cursive-ide.com/blog/cursive-1.14.0-eap1.html. I have another major feature that I don't have good online doc for, which is also not possible with the VS Code API (parinfer, a Clojure editing mode). This gives you an idea of what it looks like, but this is old and my implementation doesn't work much like this any more: https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer.

The main issue I have is that I have to share my code. My employer won't allow it (they don't even allow us to use gmail).

You either do local inference or get Azure OpenAI to have your own private gpt-4o or whatever. :)

A million times this. I have 0 interest in this product.

Just use aider - it’s CLI and open source. You can open terminal in IDE and you just use /add file for context then /drop to clean context. Better than Copilot and just less worse UX than Cursor (which has benefit of knowing which page you have open). There’s also Claude engineer but not tested it yet.

Forgot to mention killer feature - droping links to docs automatically fetches them in aider which helps with grounding for specific tasks

Look, I'm just not interested in something that gives me code on the CLI. This is no better or worse than using ChatGPT / Canvas or any other external tool.

My project has well over half a million lines of code. I'm using an IDE (in my case Qt Creator) for a reason. I'd love to get help from an LLM but CLI or external browser windows just aren't the way. The overhead of copy/paste and lack of context is a deal breaker unfortunately.

In case I'm missing something, please let me know. I'm always happy to learn.

Aider operates on your file tree / repo and edits and creates files in place. So it at least lessens the copy / paste drastically. This is a very different experience than using chatgpt or Claude on web. Still not ideal UX compared to having it in the IDE though to be clear.

What I'm trying right now is two IDEs -- PyCharm for navigating around and static analysis stuff, Cursor for "how do I do this" or "please do this for me." Cursor (VSCode?) lets you choose Jetbrains keyboard shortcuts during setup and is relatively resource light so it's not too bad.

As i understand things you...

- want to use your particular ide which does not have the llm plugin.

- don't want to use any of several ide's that support several llm's using a picker.

- don't want to use copy/paste to a web browser or other tool

- don't want to use 2 ide's at the same time if 1 of them is not your favorite

I would settle for the 3rd or 4th option, both work very well for me.

I'd never heard of Qt creator before so I checked it out and their whole front page seems to focus on ai integration?

Cool, this must be fairly recent. I didn't realize they had integrated it. Will check it out, thanks!

Open source fixes this problem. This is basically Llama's moat.

Zed lets you set it up trivially with jetbrains key maps. It doesn’t have a debugger and rough around the edges but I like that most of my Jetbrains shortcuts continue to work with zed.

> I have zero intention of moving away from IDEA and nothing I've seen so far is good enough to make me want to switch. I really with there was more of "bringing AI into your existing tools/workflows" instead of "here is a new tool with AI baked in".

For this, either GitHub Copilot or their own AI plugin seem to work nicely.

It's kind of unfortunate because creating new plugins for the JetBrains IDEs has a learning curve: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/docs/intellij/developing-plugi...

Because of this, and the fact that every additional IDE/tool you have to support also means similar development work, most companies out there will probably lean in the direction of either a web based UI, a CLI, or their own spin of VS Code or something similar.