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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

#101

Post by Finbarr »

I've been using Codebuff (formerly manicode) for a few weeks. I think they have nailed the editing paradigm and I'm using it multiple times a day.

If you want to make a multi-file edit in cursor, you open composer, probably have to click to start a new composer session, type what you want, tell it which files it needs to include, watch it run through the change (seeing only an abbreviated version of the changes it makes), click apply all, then have to go and actually look at the real diff.

With codebuff, you open codebuff in terminal and just type what you want, and it will scan the whole directory to figure out which files to include. Then you can see the whole diff. It's way cleaner and faster for making large changes. Because it can run terminal commands, it's also really good at cleaning up after itself, e.g., removing files, renaming files, installing dependencies, etc.

Both tools need work in terms of reliability, but the workflow with Codebuff is 10x better.

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

#102

Post by photonthug »

brandonchen wrote: post #79
jahooma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> I know a lot of people see the terminal as cruft/legacy from the mainframe days.

Hah. If you encounter people that think like this, run away because as soon as they finish telling you that terminals are stupid they inevitably want help configuring their GUI for k8s or git. After that, with or without a GUI, it turns out they also don’t understand version control / containers.

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

#104

Post by evnix »

jahooma wrote: post #10
anonzzzies wrote: post #8

Comparison with Aider?

Great question! In Codebuff you don't have to manually specify any files. It finds the right ones for you! It also pulls more files to get you a better result. I think this makes a huge difference in the ergonomics of just chatting to get results. Codebuff also will run commands directly, so you can ask it to write unit tests and run them as it goes to make sure they are working.

I think Aider does this to save tokens/money. It supports a lot of models so you can have Claude as your architect and another cheap model that does the coding.

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

#107

Post by kajecounterhack »

dartos wrote: post #83
tgtweak wrote: post #82

been using cline extension in vscode (which can execute commands and look at the output on terminal) and it's an incredibly adept sysadmin, cloud architect and data engineer. I like that cline lets you approve/decline execution requests and you can run it without sending the output which is safer from a data perspective. It's cool to have this natively on the remote system though. I think a safer approach would be to…

Are you an adept sysadmin, cloud architect, and/or data engineer? It’s a weird catch-22 giving praise like that to LLMs. If you are, then you might be able to intuit and fill in the gaps left my the LLM and not even know it. And if you’re not, then how could you judge? Not really much to do with that you were saying, really, just a thought I had.

I'd assume the person giving the praise is at least a bit of all 3.

> It’s a weird catch-22 giving praise like that to LLMs.

It's a bit asymmetrical though isn't it -- judging quality is in fact much easier than producing it.

> you might be able to intuit and fill in the gaps left my the LLM and not even know it

Just because you are able to fill gaps with it doesn't mean it's not good. With all of these tools you basically have to fill gaps. There are still differences between Cline vs Cursor vs Aider vs Codebuff.

Personally I've found Cline to be the best to date, followed by Cursor.

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

#108

Post by mathgeek »

cratermoon wrote: post #54
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,…

Kind of like "please describe the solution and I will write code to do it". That's not how programming works. Writing code and testing it against expectations to get to the solution, that's programming.

Language is important here. Programming, at its basic definition, is just writing code that programs a machine. Software development or even design/engineering are closer to what you’re referring to.

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

#109

Post by jahooma »

v3ss0n wrote: post #97

We already have AIDE, Continue, Cody , Aider, Cursor.. Why this?

Codebuff is the easiest to use of all these, because you just chat, and it finds all the right files to edit. There's no clicking and you don't have to confirm edits.

It is also a true agent. It can run terminal commands to aid the request. For one request it could: 1. Write a unit test 2. Run the test 3. Edit code to fix the error 4. Run it again and see it pass

If you try out Codebuff, I think you'll see why it's unique!

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

#110

Post by Retr0id »

israrkhan wrote: post #92
jahooma wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Codebu…

I am not afraid of rm -rf whole directory. I am afraid of other stuff that it can do to my machines. leak my ssh keys, cookies, persnal data, network devices, and making persistent modifications (malware) to my system. Or maybe inadvertently messing with my python version, or globally installing some library to mess up whole system.

I, as a well-intending human, have run commands that broke my local python install. At least I was vaguely aware of what I did, and was able to fix things. If I didn't know what had happened I'd be pretty lost.
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