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Feedback 1: The README really needs more details. What does it do/not do? Don't assume people have used Cursor. If it is a Cursor alternative, does it support a

Feedback 1: The README really needs more details. What does it do/not do? Don't assume people have used Cursor. If it is a Cursor alternative, does it support all of Cursor's features? As a non-Cursor user who does AI programming, there is nothing there to make me want to try it out. Feedback 2: I feel any new agentic AI tool for programming should have a comparison against Aider[1] which for me is the tool to benchmark against. Can you give a compelling reason to use this over Aider? Don't just say "VSCode" - I'm sure there are extensions for VSCode that work with Aider. As an example of the questions I have: - Does it have something like Aider's repomap (or better)? - To what granularity can I limit the context? [1] https://aider.chat/ https://aider.chat/

andrewpareles 2y ago
Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely add a feature list. To answer your question, yes - we support Cursor's features (quick edits, agent mode, chat, inline edits, links to files/folders, fast apply, etc) using open source and openly-available models (for example, we haven't trained our own autocomplete model, but you can bring any autocomplete model or "FIM" model). We don't have a repomap or codebase summary - right now we're relying on .voidrules and Gather/Agent mode to look around to implement large edits, and we find that works decently well, although we might add something like an auto-summary or Aider's repomap before exiting Beta. Regarding context - you can customize the context window and reserved amount of token space for each model. You can also use "@ to mention" to include entire files and folders, limited to the context window length. (you can also customize the model's reasoning ability, think tags to parse, tool use format (gemini/openai/anthropic), FIM support, etc).
- throwup238 2y ago
  An important Cursor feature that no one else seems to have implemented yet is documentation indexing. You give it a base URL and it crawls and generates embeddings for API documentation, guides, tutorials, specifications, RFCs, etc in a very language agnostic way. That plus an agent tool to do fuzzy or full text search on those same docs would also be nice. Referring to those @docs in the context works really well to ground the LLMs and eliminate API hallucinations Back in 2023 one of the cursor devs mentioned [1] that they first convert the HTML to markdown then do n-gram deduplication to remove nav, headers, and footers. The state of the art for chunking has probably gotten a lot better though. [1] https://forum.cursor.com/t/how-does-docs-crawling-work/264/3 https://forum.cursor.com/t/how-does-docs-crawling-work/264/3
  - RobinL 2y ago
    I agree that on the face of it this is extremely useful. I tried using it for multiple libraries and it was a complete failure though, it failed to crawl fairly standard mkdocs and sphynx sites. I guess it's better for the 'built in' ones that they've pre-indexed
    - throwup238 2y ago
      I use it mostly to index stuff like Rust docs on docs.rs and rendered mdbooks. The RAG is hit or miss but I haven’t had trouble getting things indexed.
  - steveharman 2y ago
    Just use the Context7 MCP ? Actually I'm assuming Void supports MCP.
    - andrewpareles 2y ago
      Agreed - this is one of the better solutions today.
    - Aeroi 2y ago
      can you elaborate on how context7 handles document indexing or web crawling. If i connect to the mcp server, will it be able to crawl websites fed to it?
    - gesman 2y ago
      Context7 is missing lots of info pieces from the repos it indexing and getting overbloated with similar sounding repos, which is becoming confusing for LLM's.
  - andrewpareles 2y ago
    This is a good point.We've stayed away from documentation assuming that it's more of a browser agent task, and I agree with other commenters that this would make a good MCP integration. I wonder if the next round of models trained on tool-use will be good at looking at documentation. That might solve the problem completely, although OSS and offline models will need another solution. We're definitely open to trying things out here, and will likely add a browser-using docs scraper before exiting Beta.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  Do you support @Docs? https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs
_345 2y ago
Am I the only one that has had bad experiences with aider? For me each time I've tried it, I had to wrestle with and beg the AI to do what I wanted it to do, almost always ending in me just taking over and doing it myself. If nearly everytime I use it to accomplish something it gets it 40-85% correct and I have to go in to fix the other 60-15%, what is the point? It's as slow as hand writing code then, if not slower, and my flow with Continue is simply better: 1. CTRL L block of code 2. Ask a question or give a task 3. I read what it says and then apply the change myself by CTRL C and then tweaking the one or two little things it inevitably misunderstood about my system and its requirements
- attentive 2y ago
  That depends on models you use and your prompts. Use gemini-2.5pro or sonnet3.5/3.7 or gpt-4.1 Be as specific and detailed in your prompts as you can. Include the right context.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    and what do you do if you value privacy and don't want to share everything in your project with silicon valley, or you don't want to spend $8/hr to watch Claude do your hobby for you? I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples. If I have to write a prompt as long as Claude's system prompt in order to get reliable edits, I'm not sure I've saved any time at all. At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless with local models. That's certainly my experience.
    - wredcoll 2y ago
      I haven't used local models. I don't have the 60+gb of vram to do so. I've tested aider with gemini2.5 with prompts as basic as 'write a ts file with pupeteer to load this url, click on button identified by x, fill in input y, loop over these urls' and it performed remarkably well. Llm performance is 100% dependent on the model you're using so you ca hardly generalize from a small model you run locally on a cpu.
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satvikpendem 2y ago
> The README really needs more details. What does it do/not do? Don't assume people have used Cursor. If it is a Cursor alternative, does it support all of Cursor's features? That's all in the website, not the README, but yes a bulleted list or identical info from the site would work well.
SafeDusk 2y ago
I've used both Cursor and Aider but I've always wanted something simple that I have full control on, if not just to understand how they work. So I made a minimal coding agent (with edit capability) that is fully functional using only seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think. I can just disable `ask` tool for example to have it easily go full autonomous on certain tasks. Have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami to see if it might be useful for you.
- larusso 2y ago
  Will check this out. I like to have a bit more control over my stack if possible.
f4ncyp4ntz 1y ago
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andrewpareles 2y ago

Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely add a feature list. To answer your question, yes - we support Cursor's features (quick edits, agent mode, chat, inline edits, links to files/folders, fast apply, etc) using open source and openly-available models (for example, we haven't trained our own autocomplete model, but you can bring any autocomplete model or "FIM" model). We don't have a repomap or codebase summary - right now we're relying on .voidrules and Gather/Agent mode to look around to implement large edits, and we find that works decently well, although we might add something like an auto-summary or Aider's repomap before exiting Beta. Regarding context - you can customize the context window and reserved amount of token space for each model. You can also use "@ to mention" to include entire files and folders, limited to the context window length. (you can also customize the model's reasoning ability, think tags to parse, tool use format (gemini/openai/anthropic), FIM support, etc).

throwup238 2y ago
An important Cursor feature that no one else seems to have implemented yet is documentation indexing. You give it a base URL and it crawls and generates embeddings for API documentation, guides, tutorials, specifications, RFCs, etc in a very language agnostic way. That plus an agent tool to do fuzzy or full text search on those same docs would also be nice. Referring to those @docs in the context works really well to ground the LLMs and eliminate API hallucinations Back in 2023 one of the cursor devs mentioned [1] that they first convert the HTML to markdown then do n-gram deduplication to remove nav, headers, and footers. The state of the art for chunking has probably gotten a lot better though. [1] https://forum.cursor.com/t/how-does-docs-crawling-work/264/3 https://forum.cursor.com/t/how-does-docs-crawling-work/264/3
- RobinL 2y ago
  I agree that on the face of it this is extremely useful. I tried using it for multiple libraries and it was a complete failure though, it failed to crawl fairly standard mkdocs and sphynx sites. I guess it's better for the 'built in' ones that they've pre-indexed
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I use it mostly to index stuff like Rust docs on docs.rs and rendered mdbooks. The RAG is hit or miss but I haven’t had trouble getting things indexed.
- steveharman 2y ago
  Just use the Context7 MCP ? Actually I'm assuming Void supports MCP.
  - andrewpareles 2y ago
    Agreed - this is one of the better solutions today.
  - Aeroi 2y ago
    can you elaborate on how context7 handles document indexing or web crawling. If i connect to the mcp server, will it be able to crawl websites fed to it?
  - gesman 2y ago
    Context7 is missing lots of info pieces from the repos it indexing and getting overbloated with similar sounding repos, which is becoming confusing for LLM's.
- andrewpareles 2y ago
  This is a good point.We've stayed away from documentation assuming that it's more of a browser agent task, and I agree with other commenters that this would make a good MCP integration. I wonder if the next round of models trained on tool-use will be good at looking at documentation. That might solve the problem completely, although OSS and offline models will need another solution. We're definitely open to trying things out here, and will likely add a browser-using docs scraper before exiting Beta.
satvikpendem 1y ago
Do you support @Docs? https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs

_345 2y ago

Am I the only one that has had bad experiences with aider? For me each time I've tried it, I had to wrestle with and beg the AI to do what I wanted it to do, almost always ending in me just taking over and doing it myself. If nearly everytime I use it to accomplish something it gets it 40-85% correct and I have to go in to fix the other 60-15%, what is the point? It's as slow as hand writing code then, if not slower, and my flow with Continue is simply better: 1. CTRL L block of code 2. Ask a question or give a task 3. I read what it says and then apply the change myself by CTRL C and then tweaking the one or two little things it inevitably misunderstood about my system and its requirements

attentive 2y ago
That depends on models you use and your prompts. Use gemini-2.5pro or sonnet3.5/3.7 or gpt-4.1 Be as specific and detailed in your prompts as you can. Include the right context.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  and what do you do if you value privacy and don't want to share everything in your project with silicon valley, or you don't want to spend $8/hr to watch Claude do your hobby for you? I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples. If I have to write a prompt as long as Claude's system prompt in order to get reliable edits, I'm not sure I've saved any time at all. At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless with local models. That's certainly my experience.
  - wredcoll 2y ago
    I haven't used local models. I don't have the 60+gb of vram to do so. I've tested aider with gemini2.5 with prompts as basic as 'write a ts file with pupeteer to load this url, click on button identified by x, fill in input y, loop over these urls' and it performed remarkably well. Llm performance is 100% dependent on the model you're using so you ca hardly generalize from a small model you run locally on a cpu.

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satvikpendem 2y ago

> The README really needs more details. What does it do/not do? Don't assume people have used Cursor. If it is a Cursor alternative, does it support all of Cursor's features? That's all in the website, not the README, but yes a bulleted list or identical info from the site would work well.

SafeDusk 2y ago

I've used both Cursor and Aider but I've always wanted something simple that I have full control on, if not just to understand how they work. So I made a minimal coding agent (with edit capability) that is fully functional using only seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask, and think. I can just disable `ask` tool for example to have it easily go full autonomous on certain tasks. Have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami to see if it might be useful for you.

larusso 2y ago
Will check this out. I like to have a bit more control over my stack if possible.

f4ncyp4ntz 1y ago

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