Void is a deprecated fork of Visual Studio Code designed to integrate AI agents directly into the code editing workflow. The project is no longer accepting contributions, though it remains open source and serves as a reference implementation for developers forking VS Code. The repository contains the complete source code for Void's desktop application, written primarily in TypeScript.
The core purpose of Void was to enable users to leverage AI models for coding tasks while maintaining full control over their data. The editor supported multiple AI providers and allowed users to run models locally or bring their own providers. A key architectural feature was that Void sent messages directly to providers without retaining user data on its own servers. The platform emphasized checkpoint and visualization capabilities, allowing developers to track and review AI-assisted changes to their codebase.
Void's technical implementation involved several custom extensions to the VS Code foundation. The team mounted React and Tailwind CSS into the editor, which required extending the standard VS Code build pipeline to compile React and scope Tailwind CSS using a custom tool. This represented a significant departure from plain VS Code's architecture. The project also implemented custom GitHub Actions for packaging, signing, and auto-updating the application, addressing a gap in VS Code's private build pipeline that normally makes these tasks difficult for forks.
The AI integration layer was built from scratch rather than relying on existing VS Code patterns. Void's AI provider code supported autocomplete through fill-in-the-middle functionality and custom response types, with exposed grammars for common patterns like thinking tags and tool tags. The implementation used inter-process communication and satisfied content security policy requirements. Two custom services handled code editing: EditCodeService enabled displaying diffs as code streams token by token, while VoidModelService allowed background file editing with synchronization between OS files and text buffers.
The project overlapped with contributors from langgenius/dify, rust-lang/rust, and anomalyco/opencode.
For developers interested in forking VS Code, Void provides extensive documentation including a Codebase Guide and How to Contribute documentation. The project maintains a list of active Void forks and previous releases for reference. The complete Void ecosystem spans multiple repositories under the voideditor organization, with void-builder available as a tool for developing custom versions. Community support was available through a Discord server and email contact at [email protected].
