Avante.nvim: Use Your Neovim Like Using Cursor AI IDE

I really like Cursor, however I think ultimately a good open-source alternative will likely overtake it soon.

Keep in mind Cursor is just a fork of VSCode, with AI features that are pretty much just embedded extensions. Their product is great, but many users would prefer a bring-your-own-key & selecting their own model providers.

Surprised nobody mentioned zed which is open-source, rust-based and also has some compelling AI-edit features where you can use your own model. I haven't tried Cody yet but zed and Cursor are at the top of the list for me to spend more time with.

zed: https://zed.dev/

HN Discussion from few days ago (397 pts): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302782

For old-schoolers who have been living under a rock for the past few weeks :) how is this different from using Copilot/Copilot-chat?

An aider community member made a neovim plugin. It provides the aider style pair programming chat UX. Not the cursor/copilot AI autocomplete function.

https://github.com/joshuavial/aider.nvim

I’ve heard great things about Cursor and Claude but haven’t tried them yet. I just feel like: how do I even get started?

To me it feels like trying to explain something (for an LLM) is harder than writing the actual code. Either I know what I want to do, and describing things like iteration in English is more verbose than just writing it; or I don’t know what I want to do, but then can’t coherently explain it. This is related to the “rubber duck method”: trying to explain an idea actually makes one either properly understand it or find out it doesn’t make sense / isn’t worthwhile.

For people who experience the same, do tools like Cursor make you code faster? And how does the LLM handle things you overlook in the explanation: both things you overlooked in general, and things you thought were obvious or simply forgot to include? (Does it typically fill in the missing information correctly, incorrectly but it gets caught early, or incorrectly but convincing-enough that it gets overlooked as well, leading to wasted time spent debugging later?)

The fact this was created so quickly implies to me, having AI assistance embedded in your editor is not a competitive moat/differentiator.

Curious to see how all this VC money into editors end up.

Cody plugin is a great alternative if you prefer Jetbrains IDEs. I've tried cursor several times and the AI integration is fantastic, but the plugin quality is low, navigation and refactorings are worse for me and I'm struggling to configure it the way I like :(

I get that it's still early stage, but the dependencies already look like a mess to me. No way I'm installing nui.nvim just to rock this plug-in.

Nice. Cursor just raised 60M. And yet this will eventually be more usable and yet will not see even close to that amount of money. We need a better distribution of money in the system.

dingllm.nvim is another nvim LLM plugin to look at:

https://github.com/yacineMTB/dingllm.nvim

I like Cursor's interface a lot, it's very focused and well thought out. I get noticeably better results with autocomplete and chat compared to alternatieves. I really like that I can copy the full chat responses as markdown with a button (you can't do that in Cody unfortunately). I like that it has all the capabilities of VS Code but is its own separate thing that I can use for special purpose tasks without mucking with my install and settings. I just don't like that it's 40/mo to get the full product. If my employer was footing the bill I would be all over it though.

Open source tooling is always going to be a different focus: giving you a toolbox to assemble functionality yourself.

Also shouting out Continue.dev for vscode users. I set it up yesterday, open-source version of Cursor. (not affiliated, I tried to setup Avante but I'm a neovim noob and have skill issues)

Any way to connect it to a local llm like ollama the same way as gen.nvim?

I am an paid cursor user for almost one year, still I use GitHub copilot(thanks to the open source work)just because of nvim, when I need to open single file rather than a project, and I need to ensure I am still handy with nvim.

Why is there basically zero info on the GitHub readme?

Amazing project! I'm switching to Avante as soon as they figure out how to do project edits (like Composer)

Aider for me

the best part about this is that you can just change the extension. like you are actually allowed to. whereas the extension experience on vscode would require a reload, and on cursor is not possible

Does someone know if OpenAI or Claude is stronger for code generation?

I want like a double blind where I do and don’t have LLM bot: I try to use the damned thing but I do stuff like Bazel primitives and NixOS CUDA stuff and Claude doesn’t know jack shit about that stuff.

If Claude could do custom shit on rules_python, I’d marry it.

But it’s a fucking newb on hard stuff.

Why aren't more people talking about cody from sourcegraph? For just 10$/month it offers unlimited completions using top models like sonnet 3.5 and gpt4o. Not to mention, the plugins for vscode and intellij products work perfectly well.