Being in the same product space for more than 3 months, I wonder how one can not come across 2 popular open source tools that do more or less the same thing.
Like Aider has 21k stars, and Cline has around 11k stars. Both these product names come up on HN, Reddit frequently.
Curious to know if YC does some research on existing products before backing a new business.
No comment on YC here, but I think it's easy to criticize from the outside. I've personally have been impressed by all the peers, group partners, and alumni I've met so far. I'm biased, but I think YC knows what it's doing. Also, YC backs founders, not ideas.
I listed: Cursor, Devin, Codium, Augment, Greptile, Lovable.dev, Aider.chat, mentat.ai, devlo.ai, etc
So I did mention Aider. I was definitely aware that it existed, I just hadn't used it.
I've also built a similar free and open-source tool gptme (2.5k stars), since the start of last year (GPT-3.5). It has been impossible to ignore the great work done by Aider.
I found those comments, and the work they linked to, especially valuable because it's rare to see advanced work on LLM applications done and talked about in the open. Everyone else doing equivalent work seems to want to make a startup out of it, so all we usually get is weekend hacks that stall out quickly.