We launched our VSCode product on March 2nd 2023 as a fresh YC Winter 23 batch member to thousands of eager engineers who wanted to try this new wave of assistive development technology. Since then there have been a numerous wave of extensions and vscode forks. From Google’s IDX, Copilot Chat, Cursor, Cody, ollama to name just a few.

Over the period of developing and shipping this product we gained invaluable knowledge and insight into how engineers want to use assistive AI technologies in their day to day work.

We’ve also come across and overcome many challenges while shipping as a vscode extension. Namely trying to be on device and limiting ourselves to being an editor extension. We needed to create new ways to manage local vectors, deal with many different OS's and device types, and many other challenges.

This ultimately is what led to us deciding to move all of our compute and logic to a cloud product. ai.cosine.sh We took Cosine’s RAG abilities that we had developed over years of fine tuning our on-device RAG and fully unlocked it with hardware that we can control. Going from on-device files and vector search to a very large scale PG-Vector deployment and Elastic search.

This move and the subsequent development of the cloud product showed us that the editor isn’t everything. There is way more we do without the limitations of current editor technology. 

Some credit is due here as hacker news user krashidov had exactly this suggestion on our original launch thread. So thanks @krashidov

The next wave

This is also seen in the subsequent wave of agentic editors such as Github Workspaces and Devin. We've been chasing model improvements to try to achieve what we need to move beyond the current file by file editing.

Our experience developing our cloud product has helped us realise that there is an opportunity and need for developer environments that look radically different from what we have today. The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of tomorrow will not look like the IDE of yesterday. We’re dubbing this new generation of editors the AIDE.

Artificial Intelligence Development Environment 

To power this ambitious new shift in how we edit and manipulate code we need models and tooling and models coding ability to improve.. That’s why for the past 6 months we’ve been working on developing our own model to fit our unique requirements and ambitions.

We’ve seen excellent results in our internal testing and benchmarks and will be announcing results soon.

You can stay up to date with this upcoming announcement here.