Aide, built by Codestory since 2024 and backed by Y Combinator, forks VS Code entirely rather than running as an extension on top of it, giving its AI features, a combined chat-and-edit flow, proactive agents that iterate on linter errors, and AST-based code navigation, deeper access to the editor itself than a plugin architecture allows.
Unlike several other AI-native code editors in this category built on the same VS Code foundation, Aide keeps its entire codebase open source under the Codestory organization, letting developers self-host, audit, or modify it directly rather than trusting a closed-source fork. The project reports a 62.2% score on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark measuring real-world agentic coding performance on actual GitHub issues.
Aide is free to use. For a developer who wants an AI-native editor built for multi-file, iterative problem-solving specifically, and who values being able to inspect or self-host the actual code powering it rather than trusting a closed platform, Aide's open-source status is a genuine point of difference from its closed-source competitors.
