Show HN: Sidekick, an open source Claude Code alternative

3 days ago (github.com)

Sidekick is an agentic CLI-based AI tool inspired by Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf and Cursor. It's meant to be an open source alternative to these tools, providing a similar experience but with the flexibility of using different LLM providers while keeping the agentic workflow.

It was a pet project that turned into a thing been a ton of fun to work on though and looking forward to exploring other ideas. Still in beta, so a few quirks but mostly works.

Out of interest have you found it to work well with any locally hostable models (reliable tool calling, decent coding etc...)?

  • I haven’t spent much time there. Mostly OpenaAI, Anthropic and Google as they had shown the most promise for coding. Hoping to spend more time on local models soon though.

How does this compare to aider?

  • I think Aider is great, but when I first tried it, it wasn’t “agentic” - you had to manually manage files in the context window. I found this cumbersome. I definitely resonated with Claude Code more, but wanted more model options.