I'm curious - what does the AI coding setup of the HN community look like, and how has your experience been so far?
I want to get some broader feedback before completely switching my workflow to Aide or Cursor.
replies(13):
To talk through the features, we engineered the following:
- A proactive agent
Agent which iterates on the linter errors (powered by the Language Server) and pulls in relevant context by doing go-to-definitions, go-to-references etc and propose fixes or ask for more files which might be missing in the context.
- Developer control
We encourage you to do edits on top of your coding sessions. To enable this, we built a VSCode native rollback feature which gets rid of all the edits made by the agent in a single click if there were mistakes, without messing up your changes from before.
- A combined chat+edit flow which you can use to brainstorm and edit
You can brainstorm a problem in chat by @’ting the files and then jump into edits (which can happen across multiple files) or go from a smaller set of edits and discuss the side-effects of it
- Inline editing widget
We took inspiration from the macos spotlight widget and created a similar one inside the editor, you can highlight part of the code, do Cmd+K and just give your instructions freely
- Local running AI brain
We ship a binary called sidecar which takes care of talking to the LLM providers, preparing the prompts and using the editor for the LLM. All of this is local first and you get full control over the prompts/responses without anything leaking to our end (unless you choose to use your subscription and share the data with us)
We spent the last 15 months learning about the internals of VSCode (its a non-trivial codebase) and also powering up our AI game, the framework is also at the top of swebench-lite with 43% score. On top of this, since the whole AI side of the logic runs locally on your machine you have complete control over the data, from the prompt to the responses and you can use your own API Keys as well (can be any LLM provider) and talk to them directly.
There’s still a whole lot to build and we are at 1% of the journey. Right now the editor feels robust and does not break on any of the flows which we aimed to solve for.
Let us know if there’s anything else you would like to see us build. We also want to empower extensibility and work together with the community to build the next set of features and set a new milestone of AI native editors.
I want to get some broader feedback before completely switching my workflow to Aide or Cursor.
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).
Overall it's so unfortunate that Jetbrains doesn't have a Cursor-level AI plugin* because Jetbrains IDEs by themselves are so much more powerful than base level VS Code it actually erases some small portion of the gains from AI...
(* people will link many Jetbrains AI plugins, but none are polished enough)
I also agree with the non-AI parts of JetBrains stuff being much better than the non-AI parts of Cursor. Jetbrain's refactoring tools is still very unmatched.
That said, I think the AI part is compelling enough to warrant the switch. There are code rewrite tasks that JetBrains would struggle with, that LLMs can do fairly easily.
I do wonder what api level access do we get over there as well. For sidecar to run, we need LSP + a web/panel for the ux part (deeper editor layer like undo and redo stack access will also be cool but not totally necessary)