Void - The AI Editor For People Who Hate Subscriptions

I got tired of paying Cursor's $240/year just to have my code sent to some random servers, so I tried Void. It's basically VS Code with AI features bolted on, but free and keeps your shit local. Y Combinator backed it with $500K in funding and it got 26k GitHub stars from other developers who are sick of subscription everything.

Setup Will Ruin Your Weekend

Getting Void working is a complete pain in the ass. The documentation basically doesn't exist - just a GitHub README with broken links. I spent 4 hours fighting with beta-quality binaries and macOS security warnings that made me click through 6 different dialog boxes.

Windows users have it worse - Windows Defender throws false positives and quarantines the binary. I had to whitelist it twice before it would even start. The onboarding wizard crashes constantly, especially on Linux. There's literally a GitHub issue from some Windows 11 user who can't get it to start at all.

When something breaks (and it will), you're digging through GitHub issues alone. The Discord has like 200 people and they're mostly asking the same basic questions. Community guides exist but they're written by random users, not the developers.

Once It's Working, It's Actually Pretty Good

After surviving setup hell, Void delivers on its promises. Tab completion works about as well as Cursor's - maybe 80% of the quality but good enough for most code. Chat interface is basic but functional. Agent mode either works perfectly or crashes spectacularly - there's no middle ground.

The privacy thing is legit. I ran network monitoring for weeks and confirmed your code never touches Void's servers. It connects directly to OpenAI, Claude, whatever you configure. No Microsoft data harvesting like with Copilot.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Development got paused in July 2024. The team is supposedly working on "novel AI coding ideas" but that's startup speak for "we're pivoting or out of money." YC backing means it won't disappear overnight, but don't expect bug fixes or new features anytime soon.

The 26k stars show people want this, but good luck getting support when things break. You're basically beta testing abandoned software at this point.

I've been using Void for 4 months. Here's the unfiltered reality check.

The AI Stuff That Actually Matters

Tab completion works most of the time but occasionally suggests complete garbage. Like it tried to autocomplete my React component with PHP syntax. About as good as Cursor for simple stuff, useless for complex refactoring. Slower too, especially if you're running local models.

Agent mode is either amazing or a disaster with no middle ground. Last week it perfectly refactored my entire authentication system. Two days ago it tried to delete my package.json. I save obsessively now before letting the agent touch anything.

Chat interface is basic but functional. Ask it about your code, get decent answers. The UI looks like it was designed in 2019 but hey, it works. At least your conversation history stays on your machine instead of being harvested by some corporation.

Gather mode is actually brilliant for understanding shitty legacy codebases. Point it at 20 files and it'll give you a decent overview of what the hell is going on. This feature alone kept me from switching back to Cursor immediately.

Local Models: Battery Killer 3000

Ollama integration works if you have a gaming laptop with 32GB RAM and don't mind your battery dying in an hour. I tried running Code Llama on my MacBook Air - the fans sounded like a jet engine and the whole thing got too hot to touch.

The killer bug: local models can chat about your code all day but can't actually edit files properly. They'll analyze everything perfectly then fail at the "apply changes" step. Been broken for months and nobody's fixing it since development got paused.

The Setup Nightmare Nobody Warns You About

Getting local models working was 3 hours of debugging PATH errors and getting Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, spawn ollama every fucking time I tried to start it. The MCP configuration is confusing as hell because VS Code's settings interfere with Void's settings.

WSL2 users: just don't. Save yourself the pain. It's completely broken and the workarounds involve registry hacks that'll probably brick your WSL installation.

Windows PATH issues will ruin your evening. Linux works better but you'll still spend time debugging permissions and environment variables.

The One Thing They Got Right

Privacy is legit. I ran packet captures for weeks - your code never leaves your machine unless you're using cloud APIs. Direct connections to OpenAI or Claude, no middleman servers. This is the main reason I didn't immediately switch back to Cursor despite all the other bullshit.

Worth the pain? Depends how paranoid you are about code privacy and whether you enjoy debugging obscure configuration issues at 2am.