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

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

#71

Post by jahooma »

toisanji wrote: post #64
jahooma wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, it's probably about the same, since we're both using the new Sonnet 3.5 for coding. We might have a bit of an advantage because we pull more files as context so the edit can be more in the style of your existing code. One downside to use pulling more context is we burn more tokens. That's partly why we have to charge $99 whereas cursor is $20 per month.

If its the same, hard to justify $100/month vs $20/month . I code mostly from vim so I'm searching for my vim/cli replacement while I still use both vim and Cursor.

Ah, but in Cursor you (mostly) have to manually choose files to edit and then approve all the changes.

With Codebuff, you just chat from the terminal. After trying it, I think you might not want to go back to Cursor haha.

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

#72

Post by brandonchen »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #41

Your website has a serious issue. Trying to play the YouTube video makes the page slow down to a crawl, even in 1080p, while playing it on YouTube directly has no issue, even in 4K. On the project itself, I don't really find it exciting at all, I'm sorry. It's just another wrapper for a 3rd party model, and the fact that you can 1) describe the entire workflow in 3 paragraphs, and 2) built it and launched it in aroun…

Weird, thanks for flagging – we're just using a Youtube embed in an iframe but I'll take a look.

No worries if this isn't a good fit for you. You're welcome to try it out for free anytime if you change your mind!

FWIW I wasn't super excited when James first showed me the project. I had tried so many AI code editors before, but never found them to be _actually usable_. So when James asked me to try, I just thought I'd be humoring him. Once I gave it a real shot, I found Codebuff to be great because of its form factor and deep context awareness: CLI allows for portability and system integration that plugins or extensions really can't do. And when AI actually understands my codebase, I just get a lot more done.

Not trying to convince you to change your mind, just sharing that I was in your shoes not too long ago!

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

#74

Post by handfuloflight »

jahooma wrote: post #69
handfuloflight wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you speak more to how efficiency towards context management works (to reduce token costs)? Or are you loading up context to the brim with each request?

I think managing context is the most important aspect of today's coding agents. We pick only files we think would be relevant to the user request and add those. We generally pull more files than Cursor, which I think is an advantage. However, we also try to leverage prompt-caching as much as possible to lower costs and improve latency. So we basically only add files over time. Once context gets too large, it will pur…

> However, we also try to leverage prompt-caching as much as possible to lower costs and improve latency.

Interesting! That does have 5 minute expiry on Claude, and your users can use Codebuff in an unoptimal way. Do you have plans in aligning your users towards using the tool in a way that makes the most use of prompt caches?

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

#75

Post by brandonchen »

nseth wrote: post #26

I've been playing with Codebuff for a few days (building out some services with Node.js + Typescript) - been working beautifully! Feels like I'm watching a skilled surgeon at work.

A skilled surgeon is a great analogy! We actually instruct Codebuff to focus on making the most minimal edits, so that it does precisely what you want.

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

#76

Post by toisanji »

jahooma wrote: post #71
toisanji wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its the same, hard to justify $100/month vs $20/month . I code mostly from vim so I'm searching for my vim/cli replacement while I still use both vim and Cursor.

Ah, but in Cursor you (mostly) have to manually choose files to edit and then approve all the changes. With Codebuff, you just chat from the terminal. After trying it, I think you might not want to go back to Cursor haha.

That sounds cool and I like the idea, but definitely won't pay 5x. Maybe charge $30/month plus bring your own key. Let me know when you lower the price :)

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

#78

Post by michaelmior »

jahooma wrote: post #60
cratermoon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAG is a well-known technique now, and to paraphrase Emily Bender[1], here are some reasons why it's not a solution. The code extruded from the LLM is still synthetic code, and likely to contain errors both in the form of extra tokens motivated by the pre-training data for the LLM rather than the input texts AND in the form of omission. It's difficult to detect when the summary you are relying on is actually missing…

We actually don't use RAG! It's not that good as you say. We build a description of the codebase including the file tree and parsed function names and class names, and then just ask Haiku which files are relevant! This works much better and doesn't require slowly creating an index. You can just run Codebuff in any directory and it works.

It sounds like it's arguably still a form of RAG, just where the retrieval is very different. I'm not saying that to knock your approach, just saying that it sounds like it's still the case where you're retrieving some context and then using that context to augment further generation. (I get that's definitely not what people think of when you say RAG though.)

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

#79

Post by brandonchen »

jahooma wrote: post #13
dakshgupta wrote: post #9

Love the demo video! Three quick questions: Any specific reason to choose the terminal as the interface? Do you plan to make it more extensible in the future? (sounds like this could be wrapped with an extension for any IDE, which is exciting) Also, do you see it being a problem that you can't point it to specific lines of code? In Cursor you can select some lines and CMD+K to instruct an edit. This takes away that f…

We thought about making a VSCode extension/fork like everyone else, but decided that the future is coding agents that do most of the work for you. The terminal is actually a great interface because it is so simple. It keeps the product focused to not have complex UI options. But also, we rarely thought we needed any options. It's enough to let the user say what they want in chat. You can't point to specific lines, bu…

To add on, I know a lot of people see the terminal as cruft/legacy from the mainframe days. But it is a funny thing to look at tons of people's IDE setup and see that the one _consistent_ thing between them all is that they have a terminal nearby. It makes sense, too, since programs run in the terminal and you can only abstract so much to developers. And like James said, this sets us up nicely to build for a future of coding agents running around. Feels like a unique insight, but I dunno. I guess time will tell.

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

#80

Post by jahooma »

maldous wrote: post #77

brilliant - and thank you - so impressed with your work, i finally made an account to just comment - out of the box worked, a few minor glitches, but this is the start of awesome. keep doing what you are doing.

Amazing, good to hear! What were the minor glitches you encountered? Would love to fix them up.
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