Hey HN!We have a Slack group with 30+ people and introduced this agent as a way for non-engs to push simple PRs and changes. This saves engs valuable time and context switching costs.After a while, we expanded to this being a full-blown agent and you can see some interesting use cases in the blog post: https://blog.kilo.ai/p/announcing-kilo-for-slackAny feedback is welcome!
The key word in the OP post is “Claude”. Anthropic has 2 amazing AI models (Sonnet, Opus), however they’re just a part of a much bigger picture.
When using AI for programming, you’re essentially interacting with AI models. The quality of output you get really depends on the model at the end of the day. Claude Code is optimized for models from Anthropic. You also have model-agnostic agents like Cursor and Kilo Code (disclaimer: I work at Kilo) where you can easily switch up models and see which one works the best for you converting an old jQuery + Django project into SvelteKit.
This area is moving at a crazy rate. Just the last 2 weeks alone, there were 3 main AI model versions released (first Gemini 3, then Opus 4.5, then GPT-5.2). I wrote a piece comparing their performance across 3 coding tasks [1]
So my advice is to also experiment a lot with the models because the quality can vary wildly depending on your stack.
[1] https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-tested-gpt-52pro-vs-opus-45-vs
For example, VS Code has Cline & Kilo Code (disclaimer: I help maintain Kilo).
Jetbrains has Junie, Zencoder, etc.
I've been a software developer for over 8 years and recently started using AI to help me code.The OSS project I'm currently working on (Kilo Code [1]) basically also attracts the same type of people: People with software dev. experience who like to use AI to help them do things they already know, just faster.They also don't want to be called "vibe coders". A few days ago, I created a question...
1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)
2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)
Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.
Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.
IDEs can support "AI coding agents" on their own.
The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:
1. You write a prompt
2. The "agent" wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM
3. The LLM sends back a response
4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)
Microsoft already started doing that with Copilot. And they have a vibrant ecosystem of VS Code extensions (I maintain one of them [1])
"AI agents" should be a feature, not a separate piece of software (IDE) that's integral to software devs.
2. Kilo is a feature-merge of Roo+Cline+our own features. This means at least 20 new features are added weekly.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers of Kilo.
The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:
1. You write a prompt
2. The agent wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM
3. The LLM sends back a response
4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)
I don't see why anyone would ditch their current (non-AI) IDE for Cursor just to get this functionality (especially if you're getting hit with a monthly subscription fee on top of it.)
P.S. I maintain a VS Code extension that does the 4 steps above as a baseline[1]
I had an idea for creating a crowdsourced database of AI prompts that no AI model could yet crack (wanted to use some of them as we're adding new models to Kilo Code).I've seen a bunch of those prompts scattered across HN, so thought to open a thread here so we can maybe have a centralied location for this.Share your prompt that stumps every AI model here.
"A quick scan of various reddit forums reveals how "vibe coders" experience exponential levels of difficulty past the simple landing page. Things like setting up basic auth for example is non-trivial (outside of PasS) and there are many other aspects that require at least some understanding of what is going on."
But yes, that's the way to calculate it.