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Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

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Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#11

Post by jonrouach »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #9
headcanon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you know more about it than me, but it seems to me that the main challenge is being able to include the appropriate context, and train it to output a diff which you can then apply to the codebase. Definitely looking forward to the day I review my first AI-generated PR (beyond dependency updates of course).

Yup, those seem to be the key challenges. I've been making good progress on them, but there's plenty more work to do! On the topic of "AI-generated PRs", I used my tool to file a PR to the `glow` CLI tool. I don't know the go language, so I had my tool `aider` add the feature I needed. I mostly use glow to preview README.md for GitHub, so I wanted it to render line breaks like GitHub does. https://github.com/charmbra…

Love this!

I've been iterating on a similar project, Talk-to-Repo.

It uses retrieval-augmented-generation to access the relevant parts of the code, and lets you chat and collect which code pieces you want.

Got stuck at generating good diffs, I'll be sure to look at how you've done it!

btw i started my project by turning another project, "Twitter explainer", on itself. It loaded its own code, i asked it to add new features and copy-pasted the results (with some tweaking and occasional trips to phind.com )... :)

https://github.com/Arjeo-Inc/talk-to-repo original project by Mark Tennenholtz: https://twitter.com/marktenenholtz/status/165156810719298355...

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#14

Post by ghughes »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #5

Have you done much work on using GPT to *edit* code in an existing codebase? That's been my focus lately, working on my open source GPT coding tool [0]. Generating new code from whole-cloth seems like an easier task for GPT. My tool can certainly do that, as can smol-developer, etc. But you really only do that "once" per project. Can folks use gpt-engineer to modify and extend the code it has already created, as the…

Cool project! I'm working in the same space (a ChatGPT plugin that can edit files within a shared VS Code workspace) and have built something similar to your "repo map" concept, except slightly lower-level: what you might call a "file map" generated by selectively collapsing AST nodes to fit within the available token budget. If ctags isn't cutting it for you, have a look at tree-sitter [1]. It can generate ASTs for most languages and has a nice API.

[1] https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#15

Post by anotherpaulg »

ghughes wrote: post #14
anotherpaulg wrote: post #5

Have you done much work on using GPT to *edit* code in an existing codebase? That's been my focus lately, working on my open source GPT coding tool [0]. Generating new code from whole-cloth seems like an easier task for GPT. My tool can certainly do that, as can smol-developer, etc. But you really only do that "once" per project. Can folks use gpt-engineer to modify and extend the code it has already created, as the…

Cool project! I'm working in the same space (a ChatGPT plugin that can edit files within a shared VS Code workspace) and have built something similar to your "repo map" concept, except slightly lower-level: what you might call a "file map" generated by selectively collapsing AST nodes to fit within the available token budget. If ctags isn't cutting it for you, have a look at tree-sitter [1]. It can generate ASTs for…

Glad to hear there are others working on similar things. I've been wishing there was a good forum for like minded folks to share ideas about AI coding, beyond the random drive-by commenting that happens here on HN.

I have been looking at tree-sitter quite a bit actually. I love that it has broad language support, which is a key design goal for my tool.

My only hesitation is that it doesn't appear to correctly identify multi-line function signatures & calls. If you look below at create, io.tool_error and __init__ you can see that the (row,col)-(row,col) indicies only reference the first line.

GPT would really benefit from seeing the entire function signature and call sites.

  $ tree-sitter tags aider/coders/base_coder.py
  ...
  create      | function def (39, 8) - (39, 14) `def create(`
  check_model_availability  | call     ref (54, 19) - (54, 43) `if not check_model_availability(main_model):`
  tool_error  | call     ref (56, 23) - (56, 33) `io.tool_error(`
  EditBlockCoder  | call     ref (66, 19) - (66, 33) `return EditBlockCoder(main_model, io, **kwargs)`
  ...
  __init__    | function def (74, 8) - (74, 16) `def __init__(`
  set         | call     ref (89, 26) - (89, 29) `self.abs_fnames = set()`
  ...

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#16

Post by andsoitis »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #5

Have you done much work on using GPT to *edit* code in an existing codebase? That's been my focus lately, working on my open source GPT coding tool [0]. Generating new code from whole-cloth seems like an easier task for GPT. My tool can certainly do that, as can smol-developer, etc. But you really only do that "once" per project. Can folks use gpt-engineer to modify and extend the code it has already created, as the…

> Can it be used to work on a pre-existing codebase?

For that, I posit the system would need to understand the existing code base. Not just what the code does, but the intent and the why. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether they believe LLMs understand anything. I know where I stand.

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#17

Post by grugagag »

andsoitis wrote: post #16
anotherpaulg wrote: post #5

Have you done much work on using GPT to *edit* code in an existing codebase? That's been my focus lately, working on my open source GPT coding tool [0]. Generating new code from whole-cloth seems like an easier task for GPT. My tool can certainly do that, as can smol-developer, etc. But you really only do that "once" per project. Can folks use gpt-engineer to modify and extend the code it has already created, as the…

> Can it be used to work on a pre-existing codebase? For that, I posit the system would need to understand the existing code base. Not just what the code does, but the intent and the why. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether they believe LLMs understand anything. I know where I stand.

Im there with you, LLMs don’t understand in the same sense we do. But they can transform a well written compressed spec into code. The spec becomes the true source and can be tweaked on and chatgpt regenerates the whole code over. It’s nondeterministic so everytime it will be slightly different but with multiple renditions its average should look like the travel salesman graph of the problem itself

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#18

Post by jrockway »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #5

Have you done much work on using GPT to *edit* code in an existing codebase? That's been my focus lately, working on my open source GPT coding tool [0]. Generating new code from whole-cloth seems like an easier task for GPT. My tool can certainly do that, as can smol-developer, etc. But you really only do that "once" per project. Can folks use gpt-engineer to modify and extend the code it has already created, as the…

This is something that I've also been wanting to play with. The token limit is too small for my codebase so I haven't really bothered, but it would be nice to tell it all my code and then say "refactor everything of the form `err = foo` into `if err := foo; ...`". If AI is going to take my job, it is going to have to learn to do maintenance!

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#19

Post by mayaakim »

Hey Anton, congratulations, I love the project, the results are amazing even though I still have access to gpt-3.5 only. I can't even image the results with gpt-4.

I'd love to see some improvements on the clarifications/questions part, but overall it's a great project with so much potential. Did you consider including some sort of code self-repair step?

Btw I posted a video [0] about gpt-engineer and my audience is also very impressed.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ehvtuv3ZuQ

Re: Show HN: gpt-engineer – platform for devs to tinker with AI programming tools

#20

Post by anotherpaulg »

jrockway wrote: post #18
anotherpaulg wrote: post #5

Have you done much work on using GPT to *edit* code in an existing codebase? That's been my focus lately, working on my open source GPT coding tool [0]. Generating new code from whole-cloth seems like an easier task for GPT. My tool can certainly do that, as can smol-developer, etc. But you really only do that "once" per project. Can folks use gpt-engineer to modify and extend the code it has already created, as the…

This is something that I've also been wanting to play with. The token limit is too small for my codebase so I haven't really bothered, but it would be nice to tell it all my code and then say "refactor everything of the form `err = foo` into `if err := foo; ...`". If AI is going to take my job, it is going to have to learn to do maintenance!

Give aider a try. As long as each file fits in the context window, it should work. With gpt-3.5-turbo-16k or gpt-4 you can edit files up to around 30 kbytes in size. If you have access to gpt-4-32k, you could edit files up to about 120 kbytes. See the notes here for more info:

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider#gpt-4-vs-gpt-35

I use GPT for all kinds of busy work, and code quality type work. Adding test cases or quality of life features. Things that I might not have the energy to do myself. GPT can often accomplish these tasks off a 1-2 sentence request. Or if not, it will do all the boilerplate and get you 80% of the way there and it's easy to polish up the final 20%.

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