Claude/Gemini/Codex 10-100x faster with pandō (CAD for code)
Details
- External ID
- 47169180
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Claude/Gemini/Codex 10-100x faster with pandō (CAD for code)
- Website domain
- getpando.ai
- Launched
- Feb. 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5707547169811321
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,I'm George Ciobanu (https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeciobanunyc). I built pandō ('CAD for code') because I got tired of watching AI agents burn tokens, take forever, and still get it wrong.Here's (one reason) why this happens: AI agents read and edit code as if it's just text. But code is more, much more: it has structure, syntax, relationships, and meaning.Code is DataWe built pandō around this insight.It indexes and persists your code's AST in a database, which gives AI agents instant search results, and enforces syntactically correct edits. Here's a full list of benefits that this different approach brings:1. Correct Syntax - compiler-checked and gated edits (unless you force breakage) 2. Always Safe - auto snapshots after every change, so no matter what the agent does, 'Undo' is just a click away 3. 10-100x Faster - text-based tools must 1. read context around every match they find (match number scales with codebase size), 2. send that context to the LLM, 3. wait for inference, and finally 4. wait for the LLM to finish streaming the response. In contrast, pandō edits directly on your computer, in seconds. 4. Token Savings - >100× "token compression" for some operations (e.g. rename costs the same ~40 tokens whether the symbol has one or a thousand references). 5. Reduced Exposure - pandō operations send as much or less code to the LLM provider as text tools in order to achieve a goal; some operations send no code at all to the LLM — just the intent of the transform.Every edit is atomic, hash-verified, compiler-checked, and backed up by a snapshot.Download and install the Visual Studio Code extension (keep VSCode with the extension installed open) or download it from the marketplace(https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humansof...), then connect from any MCP-compatible agent.Supported: Typescript, Javascript, Python, C/C++, C#. Coming soon: Java, Rust, Go, Clojure, R, Perl, Swift, Kotlin.https://getpando.ai feedback: george [at] human [dot] software
Enrichment
- Theme
- ai coding agents and tooling
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- faster code generation with cad interface
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Providing structural code manipulation without sending raw file contents requires reliable semantic AST parsing and graph abstraction across multiple programming languages (TS, Py, Java, C#).
What it would actually take: Requires building an MCP server backed by Tree-sitter or language server protocols (LSP) across 8+ languages to build an exact symbol reference graph and emit precise structural AST diffs. Maintaining multi-language AST parity and reliable syntactic refactorings without breaking compilation requires deep language tooling engineering.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Depwire, Pando
Feature requests: Integration with AI tools via MCP, Deterministic refactors execution
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 169 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #84 of 170 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 117 days after the earliest competitor.
- I nerfed our coding agents on purpose · hn · 2026-06-05 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Outline Driven Development · hn · 2025-11-19 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Cockpit for you Claude Code agents in Rust · hn · 2026-08-01 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Gigacode · hn · 2026-02-06 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Mysti · hn · 2025-12-23 · 216 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- AgentBox · hn · 2026-04-23 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Semble · hn · 2026-05-03 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Tilth · hn · 2026-02-09 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.