Ask HN: Any good GitHub Copilot alternatives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any good GitHub Copilot alternatives?

17 pointsmdwalters21 comments

I was a part of the GitHub Copilot beta preview, and I do not meet the requirements to use GitHub Copilot now (maintaining a popular repo, etc). Are there any good alternatives to GitHub Copilot?

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Amazon CodeWhisperer [1] was released recently, I haven’t used it yet but seems to be a good free alternative.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/

https://codeium.com/ individual plan is "free forever"

I use it sometimes and it's pretty good. Haven't done a direct comparison with Copilot though.

comparisons against copilot violating GPL licensing, codeium not:

https://codeium.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does-...

Codeium seems really shady. They're saying that my anonaddy.com e-mail address is invalid and the Vim extension downloads some opaque binaries.

Hi, Varun from the Codeium team here. This is fairly common thing to do to not support these sorts of domains to prevent abuse. Also, Copilot downloads a language server binary as well for their vim extension.

Happy to discuss how we could improve.

Hi, thanks for answering! The problem with giving companies one's real e-mail address is that they often sell it to advertisers. I've read your privacy policy, but it's still not clear to me whether you're allowed to do that (there are some phrases suggesting yes and some suggesting no).

What is the binary needed for? Why can't it be distributed as a part of the repository?

I don't use Copilot, so I can't compare it in this way.

We explicitly state in our privacy policy that we don't sell user data to third parties.

The language server is the common binary cross ides that actually processes local / repo context and communicates with the cloud service to generate completions. For now, that is closed source, similar to other tools like Tabnine and Copilot, but we may change that in the future.

The privacy policy also states:

> We and/or our third-party marketing partners may use the Personal Information you send to us for our marketing purposes, if this is in accordance with your marketing preferences.

Doesn't this imply that the third-party marketing partners get the user's e-mail address?

What's the reason behind the language server being closed-source? Do you have something to hide?

> Do you have something to hide?

I imagine this is the only reason why closed-source software exists

Problem is what companies say and do is not always aligned, things change and accidents happen.

Unfortunately, that means wide brushes are now used to paint impressions and what companies say in their terms are not trusted.

Anything locally hosted? (Can't give out our code to third parties.)

https://github.com/TabbyML/tabby

Try Refact AI https://github.com/smallcloudai/refact-self-hosting

Cody - https://about.sourcegraph.com/cody

TabNine was the main thing before GitHub copilot, but I haven’t followed up on their progress.

genie for vscode has been pretty good, I like being able to highlight then ask questions about the highlighted code, I just wish it could do on the fly vector embeddings so size wasn't a factor.

TabNine is great and it trains on YOUR codebase.

Replit's Ghostwriter

You can pay for it

I'm not willing to pay for it, though...

Why not? I’m curious to understand this phenomenon. You see value it copilot, presumably because it makes you more efficient or productive. But either not enough to pay the fee, or.. ? Mind sharing why you aren’t willing to pay? (I don’t work for GitHub. I do write commercial software though)

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