andrewpareles (u/andrewpareles)

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

maronato · 7 months ago

Personally, I’ve found agents to be a great “multitasking” tool.

Let’s say I make a few changes in the code that will require changes or additions to tests. I give the agent the test command I want it to run and the files to read, and let it cycle between running tests and modifying files.

While it’s doing that, I open Slack or do whatever else I need to do.

After a few minutes, I come back, review the agent’s changes, fix anything that needs to be fixed or give it further instructions, and move to the next thing.

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

I think a good use of time while waiting for an LLM is to ask another LLM for something. Until then Slack will do :)

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

bcrosby95 · 7 months ago

Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of things but they suck ass when it comes to providing details.

There's a reason why fully creating systems from them died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.

Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

This is completely true, and it's a really common objection.

I don't imagine people will want to fully visualize codebases in a giant unified diagram, but I find it hard to imagine that we won't have digests and overviews that at least stray from plaintext in some way.

I think there are a lot of unexplored ways of using AI to create an intelligent overview of a repo and its data structures, or a React project and its components and state, etc.

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

swyx · 7 months ago

this joke could not have been more perfectly set up if it were staged. thanks for the guffaw.

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

I should have been more careful with my wording - I was talking about major VS Code-based IDEs as alternatives. Zed is very impressive, and we've been following them since before Void's launch!

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

l-albertovich · 7 months ago

I've just installed it and tried to have it create a hello world using gemma3:27b-it-qat through ollama but it refused to do it claiming it doesn't have access to my filesystem.

Then I opened an existing file and asked it to modify a function to return a fixed value and it did the same.

I'm an absolute newb in this space so if I'm doing something stupid I'd appreciate it if you helped me correct it because I already had the C/C++ extension complain that it can only be used in "proper vscode" (I imported my settings from vscode using the wizard) and when this didn't work either it didn't spark joy as Marie Kondo would say.

Please don't get me wrong, I gave this a try because I like the idea of having a proper local open source IDE where I can run my own models (even if it's slower) and have control over my data. I'm genuinely interested in making this work.

Thanks!

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

Thanks for writing! Can you try mentioning the file with "@"? Smaller models sometimes don't realize that they should look for files and folders, but "@" always gives the full context of whatever is in the file/folder directly to them.

Small OSS models are going to get better at this when there's more of a focus on tool-use, which we're expecting in the next iteration of models.

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

jjani · 7 months ago

> 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.

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

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.

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

huevosabio · 7 months ago

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

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

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.

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

SegmentTree · 7 months ago

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.

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

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.

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

steveharman · 7 months ago

Just use the Context7 MCP ? Actually I'm assuming Void supports MCP.

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

Agreed - this is one of the better solutions today.

andrewpareles commented on Void: Open-source Cursor alternative github.com/voideditor/voi... · Posted by u/sharjeelsayed

throwup238 · 7 months ago

An important Cursor feature that no one else seems to have implemented yet is documentation indexing. You give it a base URL and it crawls and generates embeddings for API documentation, guides, tutorials, specifications, RFCs, etc in a very language agnostic way. That plus an agent tool to do fuzzy or full text search on those same docs would also be nice. Referring to those @docs in the context works really well to ground the LLMs and eliminate API hallucinations

Back in 2023 one of the cursor devs mentioned [1] that they first convert the HTML to markdown then do n-gram deduplication to remove nav, headers, and footers. The state of the art for chunking has probably gotten a lot better though.

[1] https://forum.cursor.com/t/how-does-docs-crawling-work/264/3

andrewpareles · 7 months ago

This is a good point.We've stayed away from documentation assuming that it's more of a browser agent task, and I agree with other commenters that this would make a good MCP integration.

I wonder if the next round of models trained on tool-use will be good at looking at documentation. That might solve the problem completely, although OSS and offline models will need another solution. We're definitely open to trying things out here, and will likely add a browser-using docs scraper before exiting Beta.