Gptel Alternatives

gptel reviews and mentions

• Let's Discuss Sandbox Isolation
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2026

  I use KVM/QEMU on Linux. I have a set of scripts that I use to create a new directory with a VM project and that also installs a debian image for the VM. I have an ./pull_from_vm and ./push_to_vm that I use to pull and push the git code to and from the vm. As well as a ./claude to start claude on the vm and a ./emacs to initialize and start emacs on the vm after syncing my local .spacemacs directory to the vm (I like this because of customized emacs muscle memory and because I worry that emacs can execute arbitrary code if I use it to ssh to the VM client from my host).

  I try not to run LLM's directly on my own host. The only exception I have is that I do use https://github.com/karthink/gptel on my own machine, because it is just too damn useful.

• Ex-GitHub CEO Launches a New Developer Platform for AI Agents
  26 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Feb 2026

  A year ago I added memory to my Emacs helper [0]. It was just lines in org-mode. I thought it was so stupid. It worked though. Sort of.

  That's how a trillion dollar company also does it, turns out.

  0: https://github.com/karthink/gptel

• Show HN: Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2026

  Actually, this is a copy of the older version of interface with a few lines dropped. I failed to generate a decent gif last night, will add a screenshot.

  Admittedly, while working on this, I did consult my LLMs advisor through gptel(https://github.com/karthink/gptel) with a few custom tools setup, which I cannot recommend enough.

• Is there an IDE that can use the local open-source model?
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Oct 2025

  I've been looking for this too. It seems to me as though all the ide's are trying to sell the llms as a service or trying to lock you in by downloading llms through their ide. I have been downloading llm's from huggingface as gguf files and would like to use those downloads (and running them through https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui). It is possible to run those llms as a local api using something like llama-cpp-python and would prefer to use something like that method. Zed (https://zed.dev/), which is now available on windows might be able to do it, but i'd rather use something (foss) that doesn't have a pricing model (the development focus will always be upon those who pay). tbh i'm getting a bit sick of changing ide's, as their support changes, and really would prefer not to use (microsoft) visual studio code which seems to be cornering the market. Starting to think i'm going to try to learn emacs, with https://github.com/karthink/gptel looking as if it would meet my needs.

• Claude Code IDE Integration for Emacs
  26 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Aug 2025

  The beauty of Emacs though is that it puts the user in full control. There is nothing in the world stopping anyone from modifying anything in Emacs (at least on the Elisp layer), hence packages like this.

  VS Code on the other hand is designed to fracture [1]. MS can and has given proprietary API access to their blessed tools, forcing others to go through their much less capable extension API, hence the plethora of vscode forks.

  Also, I think the derision from the Emacs community may be a bit overblown. I'm constantly seeing AI/LLM related plugins appearing for Emacs and they tend to get decent traction (e.g. https://github.com/karthink/gptel).

  [1] https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

• Show HN: A 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Written in Emacs Org Mode
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jul 2025

  Install the latest emacs release and you will be able to do `M-x eglot` – this by default knows about language servers for many programming languages, so if you e.g. do this while in a C++ file in some project, it will start clang or ccls (whatever's in PATH); the language server will then be active for all files in that project and you can use `M-.` (xref-find-definitions), `M-,` (xref-go-back), `M-?` (xref-find-references). Try also `M-x eglot-code-actions` on a symbol to see all available actions (renaming, add imports, refactoring etc.; what you get here depends on the language server).

  I also use this plugin https://github.com/minad/consult which has the command `consult-ripgrep`, very useful for e.g. looking up all occurrences of the symbol at point (and text navigation across multiple files).

  For "AI", start with https://github.com/karthink/gptel/ (its README lists alternative packages, as you can see there is no lack of llm support in emacs)

• AWS launches Kiro, its Cursor clone
  20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jul 2025

  > Here my problem with this: I don't want to be jumping an editor/IDE every 6 months, learning new key bindings and even more importantly, getting used to a completely new look.

  You're basically advocating for GNU Emacs: https://github.com/karthink/gptel

• Gptel-autocomplete: Inline code completion in Emacs using gptel
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 May 2025

  I've recently started using gptel and really like it, but the main feature I've wanted that it's missing is inline code completion (like GitHub Copilot). I saw that this was previously being [worked on](https://github.com/karthink/gptel/discussions/206) in the gptel repo but was paused, so I decided to give it a shot and made `gptel-autocomplete` (disclosure: most of it was written by Claude Sonnet 4).

  It took some experimenting to get decent code completion results from a chat API that isn't built for standalone code completion responses, but I found some techniques that worked well (details in the README).

• MCP explained without hype or fluff
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 May 2025
• Zed: The Fastest AI Code Editor
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2025
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