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Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
I'm Varun from the Codeium team. After support for VSCode, Jetbrains, Jupyter, and Colab, we are super excited to bring free AI-powered code autocomplete to Vim and Neovim.
And in the spirit of Show HN, we have a playground version for anyone to try the tech in the browser without any installation (https://www.codeium.com/playground https://www.codeium.com/playground)! We also made the vim client open source and are open to contributions.
- askiiart 4y agoNot to be confused with Codium [1], a completely FOSS, telemetry-free build of VS Code https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- varunkmohan 4y agoYes, good point. Interestingly, our VSCode extension also works on VSCodium since we uploaded it to the OpenVSX registry!
- askiiart 4y agoAwesome! If it weren't for Microsoft's... basically monopoly on extensions, I'd be all over Codium.
- tmtvl 4y agoPer the docs*, not completely telemetry-free, yet an admirable attempt. * https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md
- askiiart 4y agoOh, thank you for the correction!
- renewiltord 4y agoHow does this work? Does it ship a model to me and do it all locally? I love Copilot (one of my favourite subscriptions) but I can't use it on a plane. Would love to do this and just toggle between the two.
- varunkmohan 4y agoNo the model actually runs remotely. We would love to have some way to run a lightweight model on the user's machines but it's just not feasible given model size and amount of computation required.
- delijati 4y agoWhat are the current requirements to run that model?
- honkler 4y agonah. We know it's because if people had the model with them, they wouldn't pay you.
- space_fountain 4y agoHave you looked at the size of these models these days? Do you have the compute to run a model that takes up 100s of gigs just in hard drive space?
- honkler 4y agoyeah, i know, and I have a good enough system to run these models. Google "fauxpilot".
- space_fountain 4y agoDo you find the quality comparable to copilot? That's still an order of magnitude fewer parameters than copilot uses?
- Bilal_io 4y agoYour playground doesn't work well with Firefox on Android 13 (pixel 4a). The keyboard keeps getting hijacked.
- varunkmohan 4y agoSorry to hear that. Point noted, we will take a look - most of our testing has been on chrome / safari.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- s17n 4y agoJust out of curiosity, is there a reason that both this and copilot support Vim but not Emacs?
- varunkmohan 4y agoThis is one of the next IDEs we will be supporting! We're keeping folks on our discord (https://discord.com/invite/3XFf78nAx5 https://discord.com/invite/3XFf78nAx5) updated on this.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- harryvederci 4y agoBecause Vim is better than Emacs.
- mcbuilder 4y agoHeretic!
- gandalfgeek 4y agoYou can use https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el to get Copilot completions in Emacs. Video explainer: https://youtu.be/dZMGH_3UdSE https://youtu.be/dZMGH_3UdSE
- cschmatzler 4y agoWhich languages do you support? My main work is in Elixir, where Copilot is incredibly weak. It’s completely understandable that less training data for less popular languages means worse performance, but it’d be interesting to hear whether you’re trying to alleviate that limitation for more niche languages somehow.
- varunkmohan 4y agoElixir is not a language we are currently confident in, but in the very near future (O(weeks)), we believe we will have a model that is better than Copilot for Elixir and other niche languages.
- chillfox 4y agoIf you are planning on supporting niche languages, then please support Crystal (https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/), I am currently using Copilot with it and it’s doing ok for writing tests, but is quite bad otherwise.
- freedomben 4y agoDoes this use GPT-3 or something else on the background? If not, what is the source of the training data?
- varunkmohan 4y agoWe don't rely on any 3rd party APIs in order to keep serving costs down (which is necessary to keep this as a free service). We only use permissively licensed public code to train.
- jen20 4y agoWhat counts as permissively licensed? The FAQ is mealy-mouthed about this.
- NicoleJO 4y agoHe won't answer because he's following OpenAI's criminal footsteps.
- RockRobotRock 4y agoTotally unbiased opinion from someone who sells their own GPT-like software.
- NicoleJO 4y agoThere's no GPT in my software, nor does it work like it. Anything else you care to be wrong about?
- RockRobotRock 4y agoOh, I see that you're actually suing GitHub and OpenAI, it all makes sense now. TOTALLY not biased in any way!
- bonsaisai 4y agoIs this OK? Autocomplete suggests the text with what appears to be someone's username. https://freeimage.host/i/HaLPXDB https://freeimage.host/i/HaLPXDB
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- varunkmohan 4y agoWe are actively iterating on our data cleaning to deanonymize any user information. Of course some cases are tricky to find, but we recognize these issues are serious and will continue to work here. All of our training data is public, so we know that we won't ever produce private user info.
- NicoleJO 4y ago>We are actively iterating on our data cleaning to deanonymize any user information. You're actively trying to doxx people? Do you have any idea what the words you're using even mean??
- nothrowaways 4y agoIf they are using a publicly available code, I don't think it is appropriate to accuse them of doxxing, anyone could just go to GitHub and find the snippet of code.
- NicoleJO 4y agoWhat does deanonymize mean?
- NicoleJO 4y agoThat's proof that this "programmer" is foolishly using scraped content as a dataset. If you found that, you'll find all sorts of private information in there. This post should be taken down. The project is a security risk.
- zabil 4y agoTrying this out on neovim. Is there a way to use another key combination to accept the auto completion instead of a Tab? This is to avoid clashing with nvim-cmp's tab configuration. copilot plugin uses an alt-l combination to accept the suggestion for example
- varunkmohan 4y agoThanks for the feedback. Currently there is not, but we will look into setting up custom keybindings or some other approach.
- gkfasdfasdf 4y agoHow is this free exactly? The cost to running a quality model is certainly not zero or even cheap. Is this explained anywhere?
- varunkmohan 4y agoIt isn't zero, that's for sure! Before Codeium, we as a team were building scalable ML infrastructure for some of the world's largest ML workloads, so we have a lot of experience in building infra (especially ML serving infra) that optimizes computation on GPUs/mixed compute resources to drastically reduce serving costs. We will probably talk more about these infra side optimizations in future blog posts!
- nequo 4y agoWhat is your monetization strategy? What additional features are you planning that will generate revenue?
- sva_ 4y agoNot a very elegant way of tip-toeing around the question of "how do you finance this?/what's the catch?"
- nothrowaways 4y agoThe catch is the code runs on your machine but the team doesn't tell you.
- freedomben 4y agoYes, but that would actually be an awesome feature! If only it didn't call home so much to send unknown payloads...
- neuronexmachina 4y agoFrom their faq: https://www.codeium.com/faq https://www.codeium.com/faq > How do you plan to make money? > Fair question whenever anything is billed as free forever, especially when there are clear infrastructure serving costs as we do! To be clear, this free forever deal is in order to provide some special benefit to early adopters like yourself who have supported Codeium from the beginning. We are actively working on a bunch of exciting additional features that we may consider as part of a paid Pro subscription, but we are committed to offering state-of-the-art code completion forever for free to you and as cheaply as possible to every developer at large.
- parhamn 4y agoI think it is okay to still be figuring out the pricing and other details while you build this out, even if it is at a Show HN stage. Perhaps, I would not recommend using this on your sensitive projects just yet. Given that most of the responses are about "what is the trick?", "how is it funded", etc., it seems like HN does not feel the same? If they were to respond with some random VC as the source of funding, would it suddenly be less nefarious (even though the incentives are probably worse)? What are the other implied obligations of doing a Show HN?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoeven if it is at a Show HN stage 'Show HN' is for things that can be tried and that's about it. It has different criteria (and inputs) from things like 'Launch HN'. A Show HN needn't be complicated or look slick. The community is comfortable with work that's at an early stage. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- RobotToaster 4y agoWorth noting that only the extension is actually free (as in speech), the actual important parts, the server and model, are proprietary.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mlboss 4y agoIs there a free copilot alternative which can utilize SalesForce CodeGen model ? I looking to standup a service in my firm provide code generation capabilities.
- b1ue64 4y agoNow port it to Emacs
- cadamsau 4y agoThe negative comments in this thread are coming from a mix of critics and assholes. The difference between a critic and an asshole is whether they care about your success. You can safely ignore the assholes; critics provide the same information, but package it better. I hope you and your team succeeds in creating a competitor in this space, it's going to get really exciting.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agojust as my copilot trial is expiring, nice. will plan to try this out tonight
- k__ 4y agoPlayed around with it a little bit, but it always tries to write C code in TypeScript files.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yoyohello13 4y agoI will say this website is extremely responsive. I kept clicking back and forth on the nav links just because it loaded fast.
- nothrowaways 4y agoBe careful of this project. I am analyzing their binary in a sandbox as I write this. I was excited when I installed it a couple of hours ago. But suddenly my firewall notifications start piling up. As soon as you install it, it downloads a large binary that includes the trained models and starts a web server on your computer. Then it phones home what they call "meta data", it keeps sending heart beat even if you opt out. Basically the go binary on your machine is everything the tool needs. But before giving output it dials home.
- freedomben 4y agoMay I ask what sandbox software do you use?
- v3ss0n 4y agoyeah that kind of behavior , i had been seeing a lot in several opensource/binary projects. Mostly they are telemetry but some arent.
- honkler 4y agoLovely. Just take the trained model and upload it to github. Let people use it without "dailing home". After all, OP mentioned in comments somewhere that they are doing it for "democratizing the technology". I cannot see a better way of democratizing. And ofcourse OP will have no problem with it because their goal was not to make money off it, I was told.
- v3ss0n 4y agoDemocratizing by spying , sounds about right ;P They should relase the current model and sell later updated models for a fee , that would be a good business idea.
- nothrowaways 4y agoExactly.
- NicoleJO 4y ago
- alach11 4y agoI just ran a few experiments with data science workflows comparing Codeium to Copilot. For my tasks, Copilot performed noticeably better.
- dang 4y agoRecent and related: Show HN: Codeium – a free, fast AI codegen extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33885676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33885676 - Dec 2022 (39 comments)