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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Curious if anyone can comment on how Cursor compares to the current version of Github Copilot.

I've been using Cursor for many months now. The biggest feature it had that I wanted when I first used it was searching your own repository. It indexes all of your code in a vector DB so that it can then use RAG to make suggestions against your own codebase. That was the "killer feature" for me - I don't get a ton of value from inline code completions, but I get LOTS of value if I can ask "Is there a utility function in this repo that does XYZ?" when working in a large codebase with lots of developers.

Does anyone know if Copilot offers this know? I thought I had read a while ago that they added it, but a quick search just now brought up some relatively recent posts that said they still don't have it.

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Not that many people use Copilot Chat, anecdotally. We've focused on codebase chat when building Cody (https://cody.dev), since we can use a lot of the code search stuff we've built before. It's hard to build, esp. cross-repo where you can't just rely on what's accessible to your editor. You can try it on the web if you sign up and then go to any repository's sidebar on https://sourcegraph.com/search, or get it for VS Code/JetBrains/etc.

Can I use local models with this?

Yes! Ollama models show up in the chat model dropdown in Cody, if Ollama is running on your machine.

What about url-defined ollama? Personally, I run open-webui on an outward facing pi on its own vlan that connects to an internal machine running ollama. This is so that there is fallback to openai api if the machine is down.

Yeah, use this in your VS Code settings to use a different Ollama URL (here it's localhost:11434 but change apiEndpoint, model, and tokens to whatever).

  "cody.dev.models": [
    {
        "provider": "openaicompatible",
        "model": "mixtral:latest",
        "tokens": 4096,
        "apiEndpoint": "http://localhost:11434/v1/chat/completions"
    },
  ],

We should add an easier way to just change the Ollama URL from localhost, so you can see all the Ollama models listed as you can when it's available on localhost. Added to our TODO list!

When I tried Cody around half a year ago it only used Ollama for tab completion while chat still used propriety APIs (or the other way around). Did that change by now so you can prevent any API calls to third parties in the Cody config?

Yes, Cody can use Ollama for both chat and autocomplete. See https://sourcegraph.com/docs/cody/clients/install-vscode#sup.... This lets you use Cody fully offline, but it doesn't /prevent/ API calls to third parties; you are still able to select online models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

I have a WIP PR right now (like literally coding on it right now) making Cody support strict offline mode better (i.e., not even showing online models if you choose to be offline): https://github.com/sourcegraph/cody/pull/5221.

That's great, thanks!

That feature is getting built into the IDE, for example: https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/

Same in Xcode https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/15/apple-xcode-ai-tool-for...

I know that Copilot can see open tabs as context.

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