alt Hacker NewsI don't think you're missing anything.
Aider tends to maintain near "state of the art" including e.g. treesitter, and an actually refined (as in, iterated improvements over time) user experience.
Aider has been refining for 8000 commits since May of 2023. Codebuff "all started" circa Claude Sonnet 3.5.
The story of discovery (e.g. git patch) at best feels like a lack of researching the landscape since leaderboards for SOTA indicate whether a model performs better as whole code or diffs and Anthropic even cites Aider benchmarks, but cynically, the narrative feels a bit like looking through the things Aider has been doing differently/better, and putting them in an origin story so the feature list might sound less like the “sincerest form of flattery.”
Particularly concerning is the story talking about "seeing" users coding loops. Perhaps this is a figure of speech. As designed, Codebuff are in the middle of all users' code slinging, so perhaps it isn't.
Checking the Privacy Policy shows it's only about cookies and tracking, not about information privacy or IP protection of any kind.
Checking the Terms of Service says they own any code you post through it and can give it to others:
"However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service."
Meaning, the TOS is a for a public social media type service, not for an intellectual property service.
(Note that in VSCode "cline" can give Aider a run for its money.)
Thanks for your reply! I started Codebuff without being aware of Aider. I actually have not yet tried Aider (though I plan to try it soon!).
It's totally true that a lot of the development of Codebuff is merely me (and Brandon) working through a lot of the problems that Aider already solved! That makes sense.
Partly, my thesis is that if you start after Sonnet 3.5 is out, that you design things differently. For example, I started without manual file selection and worked to make it more like an agent that has native access to your environment.
Needless to say, I'm a fan of the work Paul has done on Aider, and I've appreciated the benchmarks and guides he's created and shared publicly. And Cline is also an amazing project which I want to try out soon as well!
With respect to privacy, we have pledged not to store your codebase, and mainly store logs that we use to debug the application. When seeing users use Codebuff, I mean I literally watched them use it, as we've done many in-person user tests, plus the Manifold Team has been using Codebuff for a while.
We also intend to release a Privacy Mode, like Cursor has, where we will not store anything at all, not even the logs of your interactions!
It makes sense to be a bit skeptical of Codebuff, since we are so new, but I intend to not let our users down!