It's totally true that a lot of the development of Codebuff is merely me (and Brandon) working through a lot of the problems that Aider already solved! That makes sense.
Partly, my thesis is that if you start after Sonnet 3.5 is out, that you design things differently. For example, I started without manual file selection and worked to make it more like an agent that has native access to your environment.
Needless to say, I'm a fan of the work Paul has done on Aider, and I've appreciated the benchmarks and guides he's created and shared publicly. And Cline is also an amazing project which I want to try out soon as well!
With respect to privacy, we have pledged not to store your codebase, and mainly store logs that we use to debug the application. When seeing users use Codebuff, I mean I literally watched them use it, as we've done many in-person user tests, plus the Manifold Team has been using Codebuff for a while.
We also intend to release a Privacy Mode, like Cursor has, where we will not store anything at all, not even the logs of your interactions!
It makes sense to be a bit skeptical of Codebuff, since we are so new, but I intend to not let our users down!
