Comment by rie_t 3 days ago
I think more competition in the "AI Editor" space is good, but I have to ask – why not make it a VSCode extension? I feel it'd be much more accessible.
Are there limitations in the extension APIs that make it hard to implement?
Are you HN backed when your Show HN gets over 200 votes?
The linked website says "Backed by Y Combinator" lol
Agreed, it’s not perfect but VS code is a pretty rich ecosystem. Dealing with the drift between a fork and the core product — and missing features/broken extensions that’ll inevitably come with that isn’t really something I want to deal with in my work flow.
Cursor has a pretty polished experience, but I keep coming back to VS Code and using continue.dev, which is a lot rougher around the edges, because the UI works well enough.
Hey, great question - you're right, extensions are more accessible - the thing is, there is no great way to build the native UI we'd want using them. For example, displaying the before-and-after is vital for us, and doesn't feel natural in an extension.
Extensions like Codeium do the most naive thing possible by writing something like <<<<<<< DIFF >>>>>>>> in your file, literally breaking syntax highlighting. Others like Copilot are super buggy.
Right now Void is built on top of an extension, but we're also modifying and hooking into parts of the IDE to make a more native UX.
A lot of folks prefer JetBrains over VSC. For example my top choice for an AI Editor today is Zed.dev which lets you trivially setup to use a variety of key maps including JetBrains.
Zed is very fast but has a long way to go still.
ssh server is still in early stages, not even p2p yet.
The requirement for extensions to be built in rust only makes it harder to adopt.
When they these 2 things get solved and the editor remains fast, it might actually be very tempting to replace vscode with zed.
Vscode is fantastic but tends to become bloated quickly....
Idk, continue is absolute trash at the moment. It manages to break my entire VScode environment, including vim hotkeys.
Because it's difficult to monetize extensions and justify a large VC valuation...
(Void is HN backed)