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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

#151

Post by brandonchen »

echelon wrote: post #139
brandonchen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question – we struggled for a long time to put our demo together precisely for this reason. Codebuff is so useful in a practical setting, but we can't bore the audience with a ton of background on a codebase when we do demos, so we have to pick a toy project. Maybe in the future, we could start our demo with a half-built project? Hopefully the demo on our homepage shows a little bit more of your day-to-day work…

If you're not worried about showing off little hints of your own codebase, record running it on one of your day to day engineering tasks. It's perfect dog fooding and would be a fun meta example. > To give a concrete example of usefulness, I was implementing a referrals feature in Drizzle a few weeks ago, and Codebuff was able to build out the cli app, frontend, backend, and set up db schema Record this! Better yet,…

Great idea! We were kicking around something like this, but couldn't get it ready in time for today's launch – but keep your eyes peeled! Our Discord community is a great place to stay up to date.

Yup, I had the same thought. I just ran into an issue during today's launch and used Codebuff to help me resolve it: https://www.tella.tv/video/solving-website-slowdown-with-ai-.... Next time, I'll try to record before I start working, but it's hard to rememeber sometimes.

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

#152

Post by brandonchen »

bambax wrote: post #145
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,…

Every experience I have had with LLMs generating code. LLMs tend to follow the prompt much too closely and produce large amounts of convoluted code that in the end prove not only unnecessary but quite toxic. Where LLMs shine is in being a personal Stack Overflow: asking a question and having a personalized, specific answer immediately, that uses one's data. But solving actual, real problems still seem out of reach. A…

I'm sure your prompting is great! It's just hard because LLMs tend to be very wordy by default. This was something we struggled with for a while, but I think we've done a good job at making Codebuff take a more minimal approach to code edits. Feel free to try it, let me know if it's still too wordy/convoluted for you.

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

#153

Post by brandonchen »

kahmeal wrote: post #106
v3ss0n wrote: post #97

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

first time?

Heh, this is an underrated comment.

Fundamentally, I think codegen a pretty new space and lots of people are jumping in because they see the promise. Remains to be seen what the consolidation looks like. With the rate of advancement in LLMs and codegen in particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see even more tools than we do now...

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

#154

Post by kajecounterhack »

dartos wrote: post #121
kajecounterhack wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bas…

> judging quality is in fact much easier than producing it There’s still a skill floor required to accurately judge something. A layman can’t accurately judge the work of a surgeon. > Just because you are able to fill gaps with it doesn't mean it's not good. If I had to fill in my sysadmin’s knowledge gaps I wouldn’t call them a good sysadmin. Not saying the tool isn’t useful, mind you, just playing semantics with ca…

> There’s still a skill floor required to accurately judge something.

Sure but it's not high at all.

Your typical sysadmin is doing a lot of Googling. If perplexity can tell you exactly what to do 90% of the time without error, that's a pretty good sysadmin.

Your typical programmer is doing a lot of googling and write-eval loops. If you are doing many flawless write-eval loops with the help of cline, cline is a pretty good programmer.

A lot of things AI is helping with also have good, easy to observe / generate, real-time metrics you can use to judge excellence.

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

#155

Post by brandonchen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #125
jahooma wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aider does all of this too, and it has for quite a while. It just tends to ask you for explicit permission when e.g. adding files to the context (potentially token-expensive), creating new files, or running commands (potentially dangerous); AFAIR there's an option (both configuration and cli arg) to auto-approve those requests, though I never tried it. Aider has extensive code for computing "repository map", with spe…

Thanks for sharing – I definitely want to plays with Aider more. My knowledge of it is limited, but IIRC Aider doesn't pull in the right files to create context for itself like Codebuff does when making updates to your codebase.

Another aspect is simplicity. I think Aider and other CLI tools tend to err towards the side of configuration and more options, and we've been very intentional with Codebuff to avoid that. Not everyone values this, surely, but our users really appreciate how simple Codebuff is in comparison.

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

#156

Post by kajecounterhack »

jahooma wrote: post #116
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…

I have heard good things about Cline! I'm curious to learn more. I need to try it out myself. I see Codebuff as a premium version of Cline, assuming that we are in fact more expensive. We do a lot of work to find more relevant files to include in context.

Tbh I used manicode once about a month ago and much preferred cline. Cline seems to find context just fine, can run terminal commands in the VS code terminal, and the flow where it proposes an edit is very good. Since it's in VS code I can even pause it and edit files then unpause it. I like that I can see how much everything costs and rely on good caching and usage based billing to get a fair price.

Admittedly the last time I used manicode was a while back but I even preferred Cursor to it, and Cursor hallucinates like a mf'er. What I liked about cursor is that I can just tell composer what files I want it to look at in the UI. But I just use Cline now because I find its performance to be the best.

Other datapoints: backend / ML engineer. Maybe other kinds of engineers have different experiences.

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

#157

Post by brandonchen »

draebek wrote: post #122

Congratulations on your launch! But I confess that I am really confused. This sounds exactly like Aider, but closed source and it's locked into a single LLM API? I just watched you use it, and looks a lot like Aider too? Why would I use this over Aider? I've seen people say "you don't have to add files to Codebuff", but Aider tells me when the LLM has requested to see files. I just have to approve it. If that bothers…

Beyond what James highlighted, I personally really like how simple Codebuff is. CLI tools tend to go a bit overboard with options and configurations imo, which is ok if you're just setting them up once or twice. But for a tool I want to rely upon every day for my work, I want them to be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Have you used Aider extensively? How are you finding it for your coding needs vs IDE-based chats?

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

#159

Post by boomskats »

brandonchen wrote: post #155
TeMPOraL wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aider does all of this too, and it has for quite a while. It just tends to ask you for explicit permission when e.g. adding files to the context (potentially token-expensive), creating new files, or running commands (potentially dangerous); AFAIR there's an option (both configuration and cli arg) to auto-approve those requests, though I never tried it. Aider has extensive code for computing "repository map", with spe…

Thanks for sharing – I definitely want to plays with Aider more. My knowledge of it is limited, but IIRC Aider doesn't pull in the right files to create context for itself like Codebuff does when making updates to your codebase. Another aspect is simplicity. I think Aider and other CLI tools tend to err towards the side of configuration and more options, and we've been very intentional with Codebuff to avoid that. No…

Aider very much does pull in the right files to create context for itself. It also uses treesitter to build a repo-map and then uses that as an initial reference for everything, asking you to add the files it thinks it needs for the context. As of quite recently it also supports adding files for context in explicit read-only mode. It works extremely well.

This is a good read: https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html

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

#160

Post by tyre »

jahooma wrote: post #28
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,…

I hear you. This is actually a foundational idea for Codebuff. I made it to work within the large-ish codebase of my previous startup, Manifold Markets. I want the demos to be of real work, but somehow they never seem as cool unless it's a neat front end toy example. Here is the demo video I sent in my application to YC, which shows it doing real stuff: https://www.loom.com/share/fd4bced4eff94095a09c6a19b7f7f45c?...

This comment makes me think of Coke vs. Pepsi.

Historically, Pepsi won taste tests and people chose Coke. Because Pepsi is sweeter, so that first sip tastes better. But it's less satisfying—too sweet—to drink a whole can.

The sexy demos don't, in my opinion and experience, win over the engineers and leaders you need. Lil startups, maybe, and engineers that love the flavor of the week. But for solving real, unsexy problems—that's where you'll pull in organizations.

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