> It seems that much like Aider, you use separate models for creating code edits and validating them.

That's right. To apply edits, Plandex first attempts a deterministic edit based on the edit snippet. In some cases this can be used without validation, and in others a validation step is needed. A "race" is then orchestrated with o3-mini between an aider-style diff edit, a whole file build, and (on the cloud service) a specialized model. I actually wrote a comment about how this works (while maintaining efficiency/cost-effectiveness) a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673412

And on the Docker question, it should be working well on Mac.

Docker containers can be somewhat slower due to most available Docker images targeting x86. If you build for Arm, it should be better.

orbstack > docker on mac

Maybe because they had a release hiatus for a bit. V1 was cool and had great ideas / interface, but needed some polish in practice (new models weren't well supported, it for in endless cycles, etc.) The explicit planning, server model, visible steps and a few other novel things were impressive though.

Hopefully the V2 will bring the polish and reliability.

You should check https://probeai.dev/ too. Thats one of those building blocks which makes AI trully understand the code.

> Would you classify Plandex as more similar to a terminal interface like Claude Code? Also it looks like Open AI released a similar terminal based tool today. https://github.com/openai/codex

Yes, I would say Plandex is generally similar in spirit to both Claude Code and OpenAI's new Codex tool. All three are agentic coding tools with a CLI interface.

A couple areas where I think Plandex can have an edge:

- Most importantly, it's almost never the case these days that a single provider offers the best models across the board for coding. Instead, each provider has their strengths and weaknesses. By slotting in the best model for each role, regardless of provider, Plandex is able to get the best of all worlds. For example, it currently uses Sonnet 3.7 by default for planning and coding, which by most accounts is still the best coding model. But for the narrow task of file edits, o3-mini offers drastically better speed, cost, and overall results. Similarly, if you go above Sonnet 3.7's context limit (200k tokens), Plandex can seamlessly move you over to a Gemini model.

- It offers some unique features, like writing all changes to a sandbox by default instead of directly to project files, that in my experience make a big difference for getting usable results and not leaving behind a mess by accident. I won't list all the features again here, but if you go through the README, I think you'll find a number of capabilities are quite helpful and aren't offered by other tools.

> Do you see an obvious distinctions or pros/cons between the terminal tools and the IDE systems?

I'm a Cursor subscriber and I use both Cursor and Plandex regularly for different kinds of tasks. For me, Cursor works better for smaller, more localized changes, while Plandex offers a better workflow for tasks that involve many steps, many files, or need many attempts to figure out the right prompt (since Plandex has more robust version control). I think once you are editing many files in one go, the IDE tab-based paradigm starts to break down a bit and it can become difficult to keep a high level perspective on everything that's changing.

Also, I'd say the terminal is naturally a better fit for executing scripts, installing dependencies, running tests and so on. It has your environment already configured, and it's able to control execution in a much more structured and reliable way. Plandex, for example, can tentatively apply a bunch of pending changes to your project, execute an LLM-generated script, and then roll back everything if the script fails. It's pretty hard to achieve that kind of low-level process control from an IDE.

Thanks for the kind words! I really appreciate it.

Thanks! I'd love to hear your feedback.

> I want Cursor-like functionality, where it’s aware of my codebase and able to make changes iteratively. It sounds like this is what I need?

Yes, Plandex uses a tree-sitter project map to identify relevant context, then makes a detailed plan, then implements each step in the plan.

> Btw one of the videos is private.

Oops, which video did you mean? Just checked them all on the README and website in incognito mode and they all seem to be working for me.

Thanks! It doesn't support MCP yet, but it has some MCP-like features built-in. For example, it can launch a browser, pull in console logs or errors, and send them to model for debugging (either step-by-step or fully automated).

Thanks Erik! I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Yeah that's fair enough. The way I look at it though, a lot of the value of Plandex is in the underlying infrastructure. While I've stuck with the terminal so far in order to try to keep a narrower focus, I plan to add other clients in the future.

It constructs context to maximize cacheability. The context window is also carefully managed for efficiency and focus. During implementation steps, only the relevant files are loaded.

UI/UX is one of the last things I'm worried about when leveraging generative tools. When I need to inspect what the model has done, a quick git diff does the trick.