Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 248 posts

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#31

Post by amethystcookie »

haxton wrote: post #24

The demos I see for these types of tools are always some toy project and doesn't reflect day to day work I do at all. Do you have any example PRs on larger more complex projects that have been written with codebuff and how much of that was human interactive? The real problem I want someone to solve is helping me with the real niche/challenging portion of a PR, ex: new tiptap extension that can do notebook code eval,…

It's pretty good for complex projects imo because codebuff can understand the structure of your codebase and which files to change to implement changes. It still struggles when there isn't good documentation, but it has helped me finish a number of projects

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#32

Post by handfuloflight »

amethystcookie wrote: post #31
haxton wrote: post #24

The demos I see for these types of tools are always some toy project and doesn't reflect day to day work I do at all. Do you have any example PRs on larger more complex projects that have been written with codebuff and how much of that was human interactive? The real problem I want someone to solve is helping me with the real niche/challenging portion of a PR, ex: new tiptap extension that can do notebook code eval,…

It's pretty good for complex projects imo because codebuff can understand the structure of your codebase and which files to change to implement changes. It still struggles when there isn't good documentation, but it has helped me finish a number of projects

> It still struggles when there isn't good documentation

@Codebuff team, does it make sense to provide a documentation.md with exposition on the systems?

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#33

Post by jahooma »

hiatus wrote: post #20
palebone wrote: post #3

I'm a big fan! It's better than cursor in many ways

Your comment is a bit suspicious given that your previous submissions are limited to manifold market links, and this tool came from that company.

Yes, he's the lead Manifold eng. Please discount appropriately.

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#34

Post by amethystcookie »

handfuloflight wrote: post #32
amethystcookie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty good for complex projects imo because codebuff can understand the structure of your codebase and which files to change to implement changes. It still struggles when there isn't good documentation, but it has helped me finish a number of projects

> It still struggles when there isn't good documentation @Codebuff team, does it make sense to provide a documentation.md with exposition on the systems?

you can put the information into knowledge.md or [description].knowledge.md, but sometimes I can't find documentation and we're both learning as we go lmao

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#36

Post by craigds »

haxton wrote: post #24

The demos I see for these types of tools are always some toy project and doesn't reflect day to day work I do at all. Do you have any example PRs on larger more complex projects that have been written with codebuff and how much of that was human interactive? The real problem I want someone to solve is helping me with the real niche/challenging portion of a PR, ex: new tiptap extension that can do notebook code eval,…

+1; Ideally I want a tool I don't have to specify the context for. If I can point it via config files at my medium-sized codebase once (~2000 py files; 300k LOC according to `cloc`) then it starts to get actually usable.

Cursor Composer doesn't handle that and seems geared towards a small handful of handpicked files.

Would codebuff be able to handle a proper sized codebase? Or do the models fundamentally not handle that much context?

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#39

Post by jahooma »

boratanrikulu wrote: post #35

Allowing LLMs to execute unrestricted commands without human review is risky and insecure.

Yes, this is a good point. I think not asking to run commands is maybe the most controversial choice we've made so far.

The reason we don't ask for human review is simply: we've found that it works fine to not ask.

We've had a few hundred users so far and usually people are skeptical of this at first, but as they use it they find that they don't want it to ask for every command. It enables cool use cases where Codebuff and iterate by running tests, seeing the error, attempting a fix, and running them again.

If you use source control like git, I also think that it's very hard for things to go wrong. Even if it ran rm -rf from your project directory, you should be able to undo that.

But here's the other thing: it won't do that. Claude is trained to be careful about this stuff and we've further prompted it to be careful.

I think not asking to run commands is the future of coding agents, so I hope you will at least entertain this idea. It's ok if you don't want to trust it, we're not asking you to do anything you are uncomfortable with.

Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

#40

Post by boratanrikulu »

codenamev wrote: post #38
boratanrikulu wrote: post #35

Allowing LLMs to execute unrestricted commands without human review is risky and insecure.

You are really missing out: https://github.com/e2b-dev/e2b

I don't see any sandbox usage in the demo video.
Post reply on HN