Founded by CodeStory, a small London-based startup backed by Y Combinator.

Aide is an open-source, privacy-first AI-native code editor forked from VS Code, pairing chat, multi-file edits, and a proactive Sidecar agent brain.

Distributed as a downloadable editor built from the codestoryai/aide and codestoryai/sidecar GitHub repositories.

Founded in 2023, with the editor and sidecar repos actively updated into 2025 and 2026.

It exists to give developers a fully open, self-hostable alternative to closed AI IDEs for multi-file, cross-codebase changes.

Requires an LLM provider API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, or local models) since the editor itself does not include a hosted model.

Open-source across the editor and Sidecar repos, can be run with local models, otherwise sends code context to whichever LLM API you configure.