First background agents in Jetbrains IDEs [video]
TLDR: made the first background coding agent that has an isolated workspace and runs locally Howdy - I’m Kevin, co-founder of Firebender, and we built the first background coding agent in android studio / Jetbrains! Why not just use Cursor background agents or OpenAI Codex? Both of these require setting up a cloud container and cloning your existing developer environment, and maintaining it. Then when you want to iterate on changes as AI inevitably makes a mistake, you either throw away the work, or have to pull down the branch and clean it up. This feels really clunky. With Firebender,…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
TLDR: made the first background coding agent that has an isolated workspace and runs locally Howdy - I’m Kevin, co-founder of Firebender, and we built the first background coding agent in android studio / Jetbrains! Why not just use Cursor background agents or OpenAI Codex? Both of these require setting up a cloud container and cloning your existing developer environment, and maintaining it. Then when you want to iterate on changes as AI inevitably makes a mistake, you either throw away the work, or have to pull down the branch and clean it up. This feels really clunky. With Firebender, background agents run locally in a lightweight git worktree/IDE tab. This means when the agent is done, you can easily clean up the changes and run code with a few clicks. Under the hood, the agent behaves similarly to claude code (didn’t want to reinvent the wheel), but also leverages all of the hooks into IntelliJ sdk like go-to-definition, find usages, auto-imports for accuracy, and it gives a cleaner visual UI for reviewing changes and merging them. You can use any frontier model like gpt-5/sonnet-4 as the base. We’ve had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of the IntelliJ codebase to cleanly set up and manage the isolated environment, and I think you’ll appreciate the simple UX of hitting cmd+enter to run a background agent anywhere. get started docs: https://docs.firebender.com/get-started/background-agents download the plugin: https://firebender.com Would love to get your feedback to help us improve the tool for you! Thanks!
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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
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Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
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I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
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For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
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