This investment by YC in both Void and Continue.dev perfectly exemplifies the VC spray-and-pray approach by backing two nearly identical open-source VSCode plugins for AI-assisted coding.
They're simply throwing money at similar projects in the same space, hoping one will stick, without any special insight or reason why one should be more successful over another.
Not a bad thing, but just a reflection that among some of these products there is nothing special when compared to rest of the bunch, there are very similar products (even backed by the same investor), and us users have no clear idea what is different between them, if anything, and why we should use one over another.
I guess similar theme can be seen in LLM/AI space in general, or previously in the streaming services, just throw as much money at the problem in the hope that your solution will stick, without any significant and clear differentiation.
This is VC operations by design since forever.
Heck, even centuries ago, they'd fund multiple ship crews to navigate the Earth, hoping one would find smth interesting.
It's the model that works in high-risk, high-reward endeavors.