Refact.ai

Refact.ai answers the AI coding question differently from Cursor and Copilot: rather than promising not to misuse your code, it removes the transfer entirely. The whole stack — inference server, plugins, agent — runs in a container on hardware you control, so proprietary source never crosses your network boundary.

The project is open source under a BSD-3-Clause licence and developed by a team operating from the Netherlands, which makes both the code and the vendor relationship auditable in a way a closed US service is not.

Self-Hosted Inference

Refact ships as a Docker image containing the model server and management interface. You point it at your own GPU, connect the VS Code or JetBrains plugin, and completion works exactly as it would against a cloud service. For organisations with an existing GPU allocation, the marginal cost per developer is close to zero.

The trade-off is honest: models you can host on a single GPU do not match frontier models on complex reasoning. For completion, boilerplate, test scaffolding and routine refactoring — which is the bulk of day-to-day assistance — the difference is much smaller than benchmark comparisons suggest.

Fine-Tuning on Your Own Codebase

Because inference is local, Refact can fine-tune on your repositories without that data leaving your infrastructure. For a large internal codebase with house conventions and private libraries, a fine-tuned smaller model often produces more useful completions than a bigger general model that has never seen your code.

The Agent

Refact includes an autonomous agent that can work across multiple files, run commands and iterate on failures. It is less polished than the commercial agents, but it runs under the same self-hosted guarantee, which for some organisations is the only way an agent gets approved at all.

Limitations to Consider

Self-hosting is real operational work: you need GPU capacity, someone to run the container and a plan for model updates. Locally hostable models trail the frontier on hard reasoning tasks. The plugin ecosystem covers VS Code and JetBrains but not much else, and the product's polish is behind Cursor's — this is a tool chosen for its deployment model rather than for its interface.

Who Should Use Refact.ai

Banks, health organisations, defence suppliers, public bodies and any team with contractual confidentiality obligations that make sending source to a third-party AI service impossible. If self-hosting is a requirement rather than a preference, Refact.ai and Tabby are the two serious options.