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Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

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Re: Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

#21

Post by happytiger »

This is starting to become a competitive field and I have no idea how to compare these tools really. Seems like most of them are some kind of gpt variant in skins.

I’m looking forward to being able to form opinions on AI models at some point, but I’m not there yet. I can only try them and see how well they work, but as yet have no objective basis of comparison.

I’m sure folks more entrenched in the research are better equipped…

Re: Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

#24

Post by wolfeidau »

I have been using Cody in VSCode for a couple of months, and I am getting a ton of value out of it.

The key things I love are:

1. It really knows how to summarise a code blocks, this can be helpful to review code in other projects, or provide a refresher to your own, it misses very little!

2. It is very smart when it comes to filling in gaps in log statements, error messages or code comments.

3. Copy and paste is mostly dead, given a small hint it fills in the gaps for common patterns and is way less error-prone, and follows my prevailing style once the project is up and running.

4. Writing tests, this really surprised me but a lot of trivial, and some not so trivial ones are generated by Cody.

Things which annoy me when using Cody:

1. Suggests when writing in markdown are not very helpful, most are wordy, and always positive, it is almost impossible to get a negative or even snarky sentence out of it...

2. Inline suggestions are a bit annoying at times, it really doesn't "know your code", or that of your libraries, for common std library calls it is great, but anything more complex or obscure it is mostly wrong.

3. It is somewhat bolted onto VSCode using some creative solutions, with VSCode only allowing more fit for purpose APIs to be used by GitHub Copilot, which is sad.

Overall it is doing a lot of the heavy lifting turning my code into English, and either entirely building tests, or fleshing out enough for me to just tweak the code a little so big from me.

Re: Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

#26

Post by fatboy »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #14
ghiculescu wrote: post #2

As a Sublime Text user I really wish more of these tools worked outside of VS Code.

Last week, I forced myself to move from Sublime Text, which I used professionally for a decade, to VSCode. Underwhelming community output bogged down by fundamental limitations, such as very limited extension UI API, ultimately results in a second rate experience compared to VSCode, where all the new cool experimental extensions appear earlier, if at all. You lose productivity because the community size didn't reach…

Maybe you already know this, but when I used to use sublime I'd save those dozens of files with cmd/ctrl-alt-s (save all open files). I think this is a universal-ish command for well-behaved applications on both windows and mac.

I miss sublime for how slick the ui feels, but I abandoned for the same reasons as you.

Re: Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

#27

Post by tomduncalf »

I tried out the chat interface of this briefly with a project I built with a rather (ahem) convoluted codebase and I was actually pretty impressed. It was able to answer questions about how the code works pretty well. Asking it how to make changes varied in quality of results, but yeah, pretty cool stuff!

Re: Cody – The AI that knows your entire codebase

#28

Post by yosito »

I've been trying to use Cody, but the user experience has been so bad that I've mostly given up. There is no clear instruction about how to add/remove repos, or how to get Cody to recognize the current repo you're in. And the UI seems poorly planned, with missing, hidden and inconsistent buttons. I spend more time figuring out how to get Cody to work than I save by using it. I think it has potential, but they seriously need to spend a sprint or two dogfooding and thinking about the UI/UX. An AI tool like this shouldn't be so damn hard to use.
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