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Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

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Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#41

Show me one of these things do something more complex then a front end intern project.

Here's a prompt I used to build the AWS infrastructure for Plandex Cloud with Plandex: https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/test/test_pr...

It's not something I would consider a complex job. A simple prompt to chatgpt could even produce a working CDK template.

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#43

It's pretty annoying that every project like this lately is just a wrapper for OpenAI API calls.

I’m moving an inordinate amount of data between the ChatGPT browser window and my IDE (a lot through copying and pasting) and this demonstrates two things: 1) ChatGPT is incredibly useful to me and 2) the worflow UX is still terrible. I think there is room for building innovative UXs with OpenAI, and so far what I’ve seen in Jetbrains and VSCode isn’t it…

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#44
Congrats on the launch, I'm excited to give it a try. I'm curious how you're having it edit files in place - having built a similar project last summer, I had trouble with reliably getting it to patch files with correct line numbers. It was especially a problem in React files with nested div's.

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a prompt I used to build the AWS infrastructure for Plandex Cloud with Plandex: https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/test/test_pr...

It's not something I would consider a complex job. A simple prompt to chatgpt could even produce a working CDK template.

Here's another one, for the backend of a Stripe billing system: https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/test/test_pr...

It seems like more examples demonstrating relatively complex tasks would be helpful, so I'll work on those.

I'm certainly not trying to claim that it can handle any task. The underlying model's intelligence and context size do place limits on what it can do. And it can definitely struggle with code that uses a lot of abstraction or indirection. But I've also been amazed by what it can accomplish on many occasions.

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#47

It's pretty annoying that every project like this lately is just a wrapper for OpenAI API calls.

I’m moving an inordinate amount of data between the ChatGPT browser window and my IDE (a lot through copying and pasting) and this demonstrates two things: 1) ChatGPT is incredibly useful to me and 2) the worflow UX is still terrible. I think there is room for building innovative UXs with OpenAI, and so far what I’ve seen in Jetbrains and VSCode isn’t it…

That was also my experience and thought process.

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#48
post #44

Congrats on the launch, I'm excited to give it a try. I'm curious how you're having it edit files in place - having built a similar project last summer, I had trouble with reliably getting it to patch files with correct line numbers. It was especially a problem in React files with nested div's.

Thanks! I tried many different ways of doing it before settling on the current approach. It's still not perfect and can make mistakes (which is why the `plandex changes` diff review TUI is essential), but it's pretty good now overall.

I was able to improve reliability of line numbers by using a chain-of-thought approach where, for each change, the model first summarizes what's changing, then outputs code that starts and ends the section in the original file, and then finally identifies the line numbers from there.

The relevant prompts are here: https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/app/server/m...

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#49
post #44

Congrats on the launch, I'm excited to give it a try. I'm curious how you're having it edit files in place - having built a similar project last summer, I had trouble with reliably getting it to patch files with correct line numbers. It was especially a problem in React files with nested div's.

Thanks! I tried many different ways of doing it before settling on the current approach. It's still not perfect and can make mistakes (which is why the `plandex changes` diff review TUI is essential), but it's pretty good now overall. I was able to improve reliability of line numbers by using a chain-of-thought approach where, for each change, the model first summarizes what's changing, then outputs code that starts…

Amazing work. Loved the video and looking forward to trying it

Can a user ask plandex to modify a commit? Maybe the commit just needs a small change, but doesn’t need to be entirely re-written. Can the scope be reduced on the spot to focus only on a commit?

Re: Show HN: Plandex – an AI coding engine for complex tasks

#50
post #37

This approach works. I just built a SPA in 3 days with GPT-4 of which about 50% was generated. My only tooling was a bash script to list all the files in the repo (with some exceptions), including a README.md planning the project, a file list, and at the end I type my task. I run about 10-15 rounds with it. At the beginning I was using GPT more heavily, but in the middle I found it easier to just fix the code myself.…

> a script to list all the files so I could easily copy paste the whole thing

Just in case you are using a Mac, you can pipe the output of your script to pbcopy so that it goes directly into your clipboard

script.sh | pbcopy

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