skp1995

They can from the openvsx store https://open-vsx.org/

We also import your extensions automatically (safe guarding against the ones with Microsoft's licensed)

You can also just download in from the vscode marketplace webpage and drag and drop it in

do you know of helix exposes the LSP APIs all the way to the editor .. if it does doing the integration should be trivial

I would take that as a compliment, big fan of Zed (I hope their extension ecosystem allows for us to plugin sidecar into Zed soon)

Tbh I did try out their implementation and it still feels early, one of the key difference we went for was to allow the user to move freely between chat and editing mode.

Oh for sure! I do want to talk about how rust really helped us so many times when doing refactors or building new features, part of the reason why we were able to iterate so quickly on the AI side of things and ship features

any reason you don't use the chat often, or maybe it's not your usecase?

Honestly we can, I haven't prompted it enough what do you want to use the model for?

RIP, didn't expect that to happen. This is the embedded video btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ZXMgnFSo8 putting it here for prosperity

> 2. Once the assistant window input became active, I wrote something short like "hi", but nothing happenned after pressing ctrl-Enter. I rageclicked around a bit, it's possible I have queued multiple requests. About 30 seconds later, suddenly I got a reply (something like "hi what do you want me to do"). That's .. not great latency. :)

Yup thats cause of the traffic and the LLM rate limits :( we are getting more TPM right now so the latency spikes should go away, I had half a mind to spin up multiple accounts to get higher TPM but oh well.... if you do end up using your own API Key, then there is no latency at all, right now the requests get pulled in a global queue so thats probably whats happening.

> 3. Since I got it working, I opened the sidecar project and sent my second assistant prompt. I got back this response after few tens of seconds: "You have used up your 5 free requests. Please log in for unlimited requests." (Idk what these 5 requests were...)

The auth flow being wonky is on us, we did fuzzy test it a bit but as with any software it slipped from the cracks. We were even wondering to skip the auth completely if you are using your own API Keys, that way there is 0 touch interaction with our llm proxy infra.

Thanks for the feedback tho, I appreciate it and we will do better

oh, I see your point now. Its weird that they are not doing the search and replace style editing. Altho now that OpenAI also has Predicted Output, I think this will improve and it won't make mistakes while rewriting longer files.

The 600 line limit might be due to the output token limit on the LLM (not sure what they are using for the code rewriting)

what was so bad about it? genuinely curious cause they did make quite a bit of noise about the integration.

Yup, I have.

We also use tree-sitter for the smartness of understanding symbols https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar/blob/ba20fb3596c71186... and also the editor for talking to the Language Server.

What we found was that its not just about having access to these tools but to smartly perform the `go-to-definition` `go-to-reference` etc to grab the right context as and when required.

Every LLM call in between slows down the response time so there are a fair bit of heuristics which we use today to sidestep that process.

I know... we could have built something free form ground up (like zed did) but we had to pick a battle between building a new editor from the grounds up or building from a solid foundation (VSCode) We are a small team right now (4 of us) and have been users of VSCode, so instead of building something new, putting energy into building from VSCode made a lot more sense to us.

you should be able to use this: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/download/1.... let me know if that does not work.

All our binaries are listed out here: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/tag/1.94.2....

great catch! Thank you for pointing this out

I can give my broader feedback: - Codegen tools today are still not great: The lack of context and not using LSP really burns down the quality of the generated code. - Autocomplete is great Autocomplete is pretty nice, IMHO it helps finish your thoughts and code faster, its like intellisense but better.

If you are working on a greenfield project, AI codegen really shines today and there are many tools in the market for that.

With Aide, we wanted it to work for engineers who spend >= 6 months on the same project and there are deep dependencies between classes/files and the project overall.

For quick answers, I have a renewed habit of going to o1-preview or sonnet3.5 and then fact checking that with google (not been to stack overflow in a long while now)

Do give AI coding a chance, I think you will be excited to say the least for the coming future and develop habits on how to best use the tool.

fork was necessary for the UX we wanted to go for. I do agree that an extension can also satisfy your needs (and it clearly is in your case)

Having a deeper integration with the editor allows for some really nice paradigms: - Rollbacks feel more native, in the sense that I do not loose my undo or redo stack - cmd+k is more in line with what you would expect with a floating widget for input instead of it being shown at the very top of your screen which is the case with any extension for now.

Going further, the changes which Microsoft are making to enable copilot editing features are only open to "copilot-chat" and no other extension (fair game for Microsoft IMHO) So keeping these things in mind, we designed the architecture in a way that we can go towards any interface (editor/extension). We did put energy into making this work deeply with the VSCode ecosystem of APIs and also added our own.

If the editor does not work to our benefit, we will take a call on moving to a different interface and thats where an extension or cloud based solution might also make sense

I do remember the Nexus 4 (jelly bean OS). I was fascinated at the time that you could play games on Android and ran the emulator for android on my desktop at that point (I was young and needed the games haha)

Open Source; giving full ownership of the data to the users; running completely locally; we want to make sure you can use Aide no matter the environment you are in.

AIDE == AI + IDE (that was our take on the name)

hahaha

There are quite a few things! VSCode's direction (I am making my own assumptions from the learnings I have) - VSCode is working on the working set direction of making multi-file edits work - Their idea of bringing in other extension is via the provider API which only copilot has access to (so you can't use them if you are not a copilot subscriber)

So just taking these things for face value, I think there is lots to innovate. No editor (bias view of mine) has really captured the idea of a pair programmer working alongside you. Even now the most beloved feature is copilot or cursor tab with the inline completions.

So we are ways further from a saturated market or even a feature set level saturation. Until we get there, I do think forks have a way to work towards their own version of an ideal AI native editor, I do think the editors of the future will look different given the upwards trend of AI abilities.

Fair point! We are not taking a stab at cursor in any way (its a great product)

In terms of features I do believe we are differentiated enough, the workflows we came up with are different and we are all about giving back the data (prompt+responses) back to the user.

The sidecar is not the killer feature, its one of the many thing which ticks the whole experience together.

Good callout on the codestoryai account being suspended, we are at @aide_dev

Yes there is, we have the binary link on our website but putting it here:

- arm64 build: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/download/1....

- x86 build: https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/download/1....

> There's such a difference in feel that may be rooted in a philosophy, but boils down to how much the creator's vision aligns with my own.

Hard agree! I do think AI will find its way into our productivity tool kit in different ways. There are still so many ways we can go about doing this, A:B comparison aside I do feel the giving people to power to mold the tool to work for themselves is the right way.

its fixed!

wooops... on it (we got rate limited by Github) in the meanwhile https://github.com/codestoryai/binaries/releases/tag/1.94.2.... check this out

you missed this one https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar Sidecar: The AI brains Aide: https://github.com/codestoryai/aide the editor

TIL, I thought we covered the ground when grepping for Aide. Funny that its also an editor

hmm.... I do think it can be extended to work outside of just the VSCode environment.

If you look at the sidecar side of things: https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar/blob/ba20fb3596c71186... these are the main APIs we use

On the editor side: https://github.com/codestoryai/ide/blob/0eb311b7e4d7d63676ad...

These are the access points we need

The binary is fairly agnostic to the environment, so there is a possibility to make it work elsewhere. Its a bit non trivial but I would be happy to brainstorm and talk more about this

I ... did not know that.

We should probably pick another name then

yup! feel free to add the client support, you are on the right track with the changes.

To test the whole flow out here are a few things you will want to do: - https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar/blob/ba20fb3596c71186... (you need to create the LLMProperties object over here) - add support for it in the broker over here: https://github.com/codestoryai/sidecar/blob/ba20fb3596c71186... - after this you should be at the very least able to test out Cmd+K (highlight and ask it to edit a section) - In Aide, if you go to User Settings: "aide self run" you can tick this and then run your local sidecar so you are hitting the right binary (kill the binary running on 42424 port, thats the webserver binary that ships along with the editor)

If all of this sounds like a lot, you can just add the client and I can also take care of the plumbing!