The CLI tool that writes code for you
Active Founders
James Grugett, Founder
Brandon Chen, Founder
Company Launches
Manicode is a CLI-based coding agent – invoke it in your Terminal and ask it to write code for you. We launched on BookFace last week and got 500 downloads and 60+ upvotes!
It’s a Cursor alternative that’s simpler and frequently performs better. Try it out:
npm install -g manicode
What people are saying
Fewer clicks, more codebase context
Manicode is different from all the other coding agents, we swear!
- It chooses files to read automatically on each message — unlike Cursor’s composer feature. This saves you time and makes Manicode respond more comprehensively.
- It takes 0 clicks — type your instructions and Manicode will edit your files directly. It's simple and fast. Theoretically, you can do all your development by just chatting with it!
- It has full access to your existing tools, scripts, and packages — Manicode can install packages, run terminal commands and tests, etc. Whatever awk/grep/pip install stuff you used to do, Manicode can do it for you instead!
- It is portable to any development environment — no lock-in here! Feel free to bring your IDE: VSCode, Cursor, Vim, Emacs, Replit, or plain text editor (if you’re a monster).
- We don’t store your codebase — we just pass individual files along to OpenAI and Anthropic as is necessary to generate code. We didn’t even have a database until a couple weeks ago!
Manicode can write code for every tech stack – we know because we’ve built software from full-stack web apps to IoT device firmware.
https://www.tella.tv/video/code-coding-agent-bh6l
Offer
To celebrate our launch, we are giving away 2,500 free Manicode credits per month for a limited time to new users!
To claim, 1. get Manicode in your terminal:
npm install -g manicode
2. Run manicode in your project directory.
3. Finally, enter “login” to sign up and claim the 2,500 free credits.
Also, existing users: you can refer your friends at manicode.ai/referrals — when you refer a friend, you’ll both get 500 credits per month!
🙏 Ask
Try it out and give us feedback! Check out our website https://manicode.ai
If you have any thoughts, please join our Discord: https://discord.gg/mcWTGjgTj3. We love love love all feedback, positive and negative! Even slightly backhanded ones like this 😅:
So please try Manicode out and let us know what you think!
YC Sign Photo
Selected answers from Codebuff's original YC application for the F24 Batch
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
Better code generation than Cursor
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
I’ve been working on it since July 4th, which is less than 2 months.
During this period, I’ve spent at least a few weeks completely immersed in building Manicode at ~80 hours per week. I’ve also been juggling responsibilities at Manifold, including interviewing many candidates for a backend engineer position, keeping up 1:1’s with my reports, and attending daily standup to guide the company.
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
Manicode is your coding assistant: run manicode in your terminal in your project directory, ask it to do any coding task, and it will make changes to your files.
...and it will do a really good job. Why?
- It has full access to read and write to your files, run terminal commands, and scrape the web
It can grab files it needs for context, edit multiple files at once (no copy-pasting), run the type checker, run tests, install dependencies, and search for documentation.
These abilities are key to doing the best job and will only become more powerful as LLM's continue to level up.
- It uses so-called "knowledge" files
LLM's perform so much better with extra context!
With Manicode, we've come up with this idea to check in knowledge.md files in any directory, and write down extra bits of context, like which 3 files you need to edit in order to create a new endpoint. Or which patterns are being deprecated and which should be used. Or which directories can import from other directories.
Every codebase has lots of implicit knowledge like this that you have to impart to your engineers. Once written down, it makes Claude really fly! It's truly a night and day difference.
- It's synchronous, and you can give feedback
You're chatting with it. It takes ~30 seconds to get back to you and then you can tell it what you want to do next or what it did wrong.
This keeps Manicode on track and aligned.
- It learns
The flow of using Manicode is:
Ask it to do something
If it fails, point out its error
Manicode fixes the error and automatically writes down how it can improve for next time in a knowledge file
You push the commit, and now Manicode has become even more capable when the next engineer runs it in the codebase.
This is the magic loop that will make Manicode productive for experienced engineers in giant codebases.
- We're unafraid to spend for better results
We can use as many parallel API calls with as much context as we can to produce the best code, because we know that the alternative is human labor, which is much more expensive.