AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Mode – Your Personal AI Code Copilot for VS Code
Hi HN, I’m excited to introduce Mode, now in early access! Mode is a Visual Studio Code extension I’ve been working on, acting as your personal AI code copilot. It’s a reliable backup to coding tools like Cursor, especially when you run out of free tokens. Try it out here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=aruna-la... Why Use Mode: Bypass Token Limitations: If you find yourself copy-pasting code into ChatGPT or Claude after running out of free tokens, Mode is for you. Mode lets you to use your own API keys and subscriptions, giving you uninterrupted, seamless…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Mode – Your Personal AI Code Copilot for VS Code launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Agent that implements a task/issue + runs in the background
2025 · github.blog · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we’re Nate and Ty, co-founders of Continue, an open-source autopilot for software development built to be deeply customizable and continuously learn from development data. It consists of an extended language server and (to start) a VS Code extension. Our GitHub is https://github.com/continuedev/continue. You can watch a demo of Continue and download the extension at https://continue.dev — — — A growing number of developers are replacing Google + Stack Overflow with Large Language Models (LLMs) as their primary approach to get help, similar to how…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I'm Andrew, one of the creators of Void. I made this open source version of Cursor where you can get all of Cursor's core features but in a fully-customizable IDE (ctrl+k, ctrl+L). We love Cursor but there are so many other features we want to build, like allowing AI to edit multiple files at once, or giving AI better understanding of your file system. Void is the open-source, fully customizable tool we've been wanting. The hard part: we're building Void as a fork of vscode. The repo has great documentation for extensions, but going deeper gets pretty involved. All of the code is…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Dropstone 3free tier, from $15/mo▲206I’ve been trying out Dropstone, a new IDE with a self-learning AI that actually adapts to how you code. Unlike Cursor or Claude, it runs locally, has no token limits, and gets better the more you use it. What impressed me is that it learns from your edits and naming patterns while keeping everything private on your own system. It even explains its reasoning for every suggestion and has quick undo and fallback options that keep you in flow. It genuinely feels like coding with an assistant that remembers you.
Feb 2026 · dropstone.io · its alternatives →
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Pi Coding Agent▲176A new Emacs mode for AI-assisted coding (Claude Code style), with native Emacs buffers instead of a flickering terminal. Built on top of pi, a no-bs open source Claude Code alternative. It supports Claude, GPT, Gemini, Ollama. I've been using it daily for weeks. Demo video that says more than $NUMBER words: https://danielnouri.org/media/pi-coding-agent-demo.mp4 The key decision here is that we have two separate windows: chat history is a markdown-mode buffer, with beautiful rendering, unlimted scrollback, selective tool expansion where it matters, etc. The input window…
May 2026 · pi.dev · its alternatives →
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Vibe Coder▲205Talk with AI to build products—in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The Frontend Stack for Agents & Generative UI. React, Angular, Mobile, Slack, and more. Makers of the AG-UI Protocol - CopilotKit/CopilotKit
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Code Mode▲144I’ve been testing a simple idea inspired by Apple/Cloudflare/Anthropic: LLMs are far better at writing a small program than coordinating multiple tool calls. So instead of giving the model 10+ tools, I exposed one: a TypeScript sandbox with access to the same interfaces. The model writes a script → it runs once → done. What changed - +68% reduction in token use - No multi-step drift or retries - Local models (Llama 3.1 8B / Phi-3) became much more reliable Repo: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/code-mode Curious whether others have seen…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, Code Llama was released, but we noticed a ton of questions in the main thread about how/where to use it — not just from an API or the terminal, but in your own codebase as a drop-in replacement for Copilot Chat. Without this, developers don't get much utility from the model. This concern is also important because benchmarks like HumanEval don't perfectly reflect the quality of responses. There's likely to be a flurry of improvements to coding models in the coming months, and rather than relying on the benchmarks to evaluate them, the community will get better feedback from people…
2023 · continue.dev · its alternatives →
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KingCoding▲91Run Claude, Codex & Cursor in parallel from one dashboard
Mar 2026 · kingcode.shingoirie.com · its alternatives →
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Bindly▲76Hi HN, I’m a product designer by background, not a traditional software engineer. Over the last year, tools like Claude and ChatGPT completely changed how I work. I started with small internal tools, and now I’m “vibe coding” multiple highly personalized apps. As I iterated between Claude Code (implementation) and ChatGPT (ideation / thinking), I kept running into the same problem. To think clearly, I had to repeatedly re-explain: - what the code currently does, - what changed recently, - and why certain decisions were made. That re-summarization step became a real bottleneck. So I…
2016 · bind.ly · its alternatives →
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Rubberduck▲150ChatGPT for Visual Studio code
2023 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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- 18MY
Hi HN! We’re MutableAI (YC W22) (https://mutable.ai). Our mission is to reduce the time and cost to create high quality code using AI. We have worked at the full gamut of companies ranging from startups to big tech and have gotten the sense that many of the rote aspects of software development could be made easier, freeing up precious mental energy. Devs love Copilot, but autocomplete is just one of many ways that AI should make programming easier. We’re taking a more comprehensive approach to developer tooling that bundles Copilot-like autocomplete with documentation, custom AI…
2022 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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Hey, HN! I was trying to find a good Copilot alternative since my experience with copilot degraded a lot and recent OpenAI drama leaves me no hope for improvement and i decided to take a look at self-hosting options. At the same time Copilot net is a small one - just 12b parameters and 2k of context. You can run much bigger networks locally in 2023. I have figured out that there are no good local options: most of the VS Code plugins simply connect neural networks to the code while copilot has extensive post and pre processing steps. Some of them still work with original copilot plugin (ie…
2023 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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ChatIDE is a sort of a DIY Github copilot X. Launch ChatIDE with a `Cmd + Shift + i`. You bring your own OpenAI api key. You can set the system prompt, temperature, and max tokens in the extension settings. The extension is currently not aware of any of the files in your project, although that might be cool to add later. Use it just like you would use ChatGPT in the browser. Feedback and contributions more than welcome.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Code▲20Hey HN, Today we're launching Code, a community-driven, open-source coding agent for your terminal. It's a fork of OpenAI's codex with a focus on developer ergonomics and local control. Key features: - Browser integration – attach to your Chrome via CDP or use a built-in headless browser. You can browse pages, run the CLI in a browser session, and even take screenshots from the terminal. - Multi-agent commands – /plan, /solve and /code orchestrate multiple models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to propose and implement solutions, with consensus or race options. - Diff viewer – see…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I built a small VS Code extension to solve a problem I kept running into. When I’m working on something new, I usually have good reference code somewhere else: - an old service - a starter project - a pattern I’ve used before The problem is that against can't see any of that unless I copy it into the repo. So I built Agent Context. It lets you attach external folders into your current workspace (via symlinks), so: - you can browse them alongside your current project - and your AI tools can use them as context It also maintains a small generated instructions file listing what’s attached, so…
Apr 2026 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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For the past 4 years, I've been tracking the install counts of AI coding extensions in the Visual Studio Code marketplace (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.) Today, I built an interactive dashboard that lets you see daily install counts for any of them over time. The chart shows GitHub Copilot by default, and you can overlay or swap in any of the other 20+ tools to compare. You can also see important dates in each tool's history (pricing changes, major releases, etc.) and how daily installs changed around those dates. Important caveats: 1) This only tracks VS Code extension…
2025 · bloomberry.com · its alternatives →
- 24IM
Hey guys, I made a VS Code extension, within which you can use the Mixtral 8x7B AI model for free. Mixtral 8x7B is a new AI model from the Mistral family, which outperforms GPT-3 in many benchmarks, a fact that I have personally confirmed in daily coding tasks, where Mistral 8x7B was the clear winner. You can use all the AI features, such as AI Lens with custom instructions and similar. I'm pretty sure some of features will be useful to you. I'd appreciate both, positive and negative feedback!
2023 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →