AI code editors are in high demand right now. Soon, developers will have another option with Melty. The startup, from the latest Y Combinator batch, aims to stand out from competitors with a comprehensive approach.
Charlie Holtz and Jackson DeCampos are behind Melty. The idea came from frustration with existing AI coding tools. "We're big fans of the tools that are out there. But we still find ourselves copy-pasting from Claude, juggling ten chats for the same task, and committing buggy code that comes back to bite us later," Holtz shared on X, describing his experiences with other editors.
A holistic approach to AI-assisted coding
Melty differentiates itself by working with developers across the entire workflow, from the terminal to GitHub. The team even uses Melty for its own development: After just 28 days, the software has written half of its own code.
According to demo videos, the editor can restructure code, create web apps, search large codebases, and even write Git commits. As usual, interaction happens through a chat window. However, Melty then inserts the generated code automatically, eliminating tedious copying and pasting.
Video: via Melty
The founders have ambitious goals: Melty should help developers better understand their code, act as a pair programmer, and adapt to any codebase. It should also integrate with compilers, terminals, and tools like Linear and GitHub.
Holtz and DeCampos met at Brown University. Holtz led the "Hacker in Residence" team at Replicate and has made a name for himself as an indie hacker online. Among other projects, he released one of the first Mac clients for local use of Stable Diffusion. DeCampos developed the AI infrastructure for dynamic preview image selection at Netflix.
Interested developers can sign up for early access via a Google form. The open-source code is available on GitHub.
The current AI coding landscape
AI editors like Cursor are currently very popular in the coding community, as evidenced by numerous X posts and YouTube videos. They promise to enable users to develop software with minimal programming knowledge.
However, Cursor is "only" a modification of Microsoft's VS Code, allowing direct communication with language models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4 instead of opening a separate browser window.
Melty also appears to be based on VS Code, but seems to offer a promising approach to supporting the entire development process rather than just generating code snippets. Unlike AI engineers such as Devin, Melty is less focused on autonomous agents and instead keeps control with human developers.
Although Melty is part of Y Combinator, it's not yet certain that it will become a finished and sustainable product. So far, there's only a proof of concept. The most popular coding tool is still Github Copilot, which is based on GPT-4.
