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Comment by aunch | Hacker News Reader

From the Codeium (https://www.codeium.com) team here!

Exciting to see more teams take on the code search problem - modern pure regex definitely is a suboptimal solution.

Just to objectively highlight some of the similarities and differences between Bloop and Codeium Search (Codeium also provides Autocomplete) to a user:

- Both are free for individuals

- Both use a mix of AI and regex

- Bloop has both free local and paid cloud offerings, Codeium only works locally (but therefore doesn't work as well on super large codebases)

- Codeium uses custom proprietary embedding models so no dependency on OpenAI and no code is sent to a third party AI

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Posting about your company when relevant is one thing, advertising it another’s launch thread is another, and it’s pretty gauche… especially when, in this very thread, one of your testimonials is saying he doesn’t actually use your product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236557

sorry! on a previous post, someone encouraged me to just post when Codeium was relevant, didn't realize the norms around launch threads.

and wrt the other comment, it is totally accurate - changing developer behavior for these search products is tough! we welcome any ideas :)

I disagree, I am very happy that parent posted this. I want to know about other tools in this space, and the comment contains a nice summary of pros and cons, some of which are extremely relevant to me!

Bloop looks awesome too, don't get me wrong, and I'll check it out.

I don't see the issue with this. It happens on most of these Launch threads and is a common occurrence. I don't think there are rules that prohibit it either.

There's no formal rule against it but it's often done in bad taste. When people overpromote their thing in someone else's launch thread, we tend to scold them. Someone else's launch is not a great place for competitive promotion—each product or project deserves its day in the sun. On the other hand, users like to discuss alternatives and comparables, and that seems healthy.

I'd say the sweet spot is somewhere between just leaving the competitor's launch thread alone, or, if you must, then (1) mention it once and stop there; and (2) when you have any relationship with the alternative thing, disclose it.

That's the sort of thinking we apply in practice but wouldn't make a formal rule out of, partly because it's always evolving, but mainly because we don't want the list of rules to be too long. If we tried to codify all such things we'd end up with a bureaucratic list of hundreds of rules—ugh!

Why do I care if they have custom proprietary embedding model or not? Why is OpenAI any less trust worthy than Codeium? I imagine people care about quality of results more, and I'm doubtful Codeium's proprietary embedding is better than GPT4.

Also most of your comment history is self promotion for Codeium which is not a great look.

that's fair - the point was less about the model and more about the fact that your code is not sent anywhere because it all happens locally

ill start commenting on other things - i usually just upvote on things that i find interesting but dont know enough to comment on

Just to be clear, since you say it's local, when you say no code is sent to a third party AI that includes Codeium? For search and indexing, code is not sent over the network at all?

yes. indexing and search happens on your machine, nothing sent over network

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