A new open-source AI-powered code editor, Void IDE, was recently released in beta, positioning itself as a privacy-focused and free alternative to popular closed-source AI editors like Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Backed by Y Combinator, Void IDE is a fork of Visual Studio Code. While Microsoft recently announced plans to open Source its GitHub Copilot Chat Extension possibly in a few months, the beta release is available now for the community to fiddle with.
The primary motivation behind Void IDE is to address concerns surrounding the privacy and cost associated with proprietary AI coding tools. Closed-source editors may require sending private code data through their backends, raising privacy issues and leading to ongoing subscription costs. While the backend may often keep only embeddings computed from the code, the original code may sometimes be recoverable. As the authors of the paper Mitigating Privacy Risks in LLM Embeddings from Embedding Inversion explain:
The surge in popularity of embedding vector databases in LLMs has been accompanied by significant concerns about privacy leakage. Embedding vector databases are particularly vulnerable to embedding inversion attacks, where adversaries can exploit the embeddings to reverse-engineer and extract sensitive information from the original text data.
Void IDE aims to provide options for keeping developers in control of their data. Void IDE can leverage various Large Language Models (LLMs), supporting direct integrations with services like Claude, GPT, and Gemini, as well as local model hosting via Ollama. This ensures that AI processing can happen locally or via direct API calls, avoiding a third-party middleman.
Void IDE offers a range of AI-centric features familiar to users of tools like Cursor. These include inline code editing, contextual AI chat, and code generation. The editor also features advanced capabilities like file system awareness for codebase-wide context and the ability to view/edit the underlying prompts sent to the AI.
Being a fork from VS Code, Void IDE is able to let its users migrate their themes, key bindings, and settings.
Developers on Hacker News and Reddit expressed interest, particularly regarding its open-source nature and privacy stance. Discussions include comparisons to other AI coding tools and editors. Some developers expressed skepticism about the proliferation of VS Code forks, with others asking why not use an extension instead. The project is actively developed, with the team encouraging contributions from the community to shape its future roadmap.
