I don't see the value. Why is this better than Cursor? What guarantees that you won't steal my code?
Wasn't there a recent startup in F24 that stole code from another YC company and fire was quickly put out by everyone?
Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
171–180 of 248 posts
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Will do Also forwarding to our competitors, but something tells me they will ignore this.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#173I don't see the value. Why is this better than Cursor? What guarantees that you won't steal my code? Wasn't there a recent startup in F24 that stole code from another YC company and fire was quickly put out by everyone?
Codebuff is a bit simpler and requires less input from the user since you just chat and it does multi-file edits/runs commands. It's also more powerful since it pulls more files as context.
I think you just need to try it to see the difference. You can feel how much easier it is haha.
We don't store your codebase, and have a similar policy to Cursor, in that our server is mostly a thin wrapper that forwards requests to LLM providers.
The PearAI debacle is another story, but mostly they copied the open source project Continue.dev without giving proper attribution.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#174The 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…
> LLMs tend to follow the prompt much too closely
> produce large amounts of convoluted code that in the end prove not only unnecessary but quite toxic.
What does that say about your prompting?
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#175Does anyone know of a “copilot” style autocomplete in the CLI? I don’t want it to run anything for me, just predict what command I might type next
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#176I gave this a spin, this is the best iteration I've seen of a CLI agent, or just best agent period actually. Extremely impressed with how well it did making some modifications to my fairly complex 10,000 LOC codebase, with minimal instruction. Will gladly pay $99/mo when I run out of credits if it keeps up this level.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#177I'm not paying $20 for my ssh keys and rest of the clipboard to be sent to multiple unknown 3rd parties, thanks, not for me. Would however pay for actual software that I can just buy instead of rent to do the task of inline shell assitance, without making network calls behind my back that i'm not in complete perfectionist one hundred point zero zero per cent control of. Sorry just my opinion in general with these typ…
The main issue is the models you need to do the job are too big for most consumers, even people with nice video cards. You'll need a couple L40S GPUs at minimum. Maybe a few H100s more realistically.
So do you want to buy tens of thousands of dollars in GPUs or do you want to rent them second-by-second? Most people will choose the latter. I understand you don't trust the infrastructure and that's reasonable. If self-hosting was viable it would be more popular.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely! Imaging setting a bunch of css styles through a long winded AI conversation, when you could have an IDE to do it in a few seconds. I don't need that. The long tail of niche engineering problems is the time consuming bit now. That's not being solved at all, IMHO.
> ... setting a bunch of css styles through a long winded AI conversation Any links on this topic you rate/could share?
"On the checkout page at the very bottom there are two buttons that are visible when the user chooses to select fast shipping. The right one of those buttons should be a tiny bit more round and it seems like it's not 100% vertically aligned with the other button."
Takes a lot longer to write than just diving into the code. I think that's what they meant.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mainly from experience. From when I set it up I didn't have the feature to ask whether to run commands. It has been rawdogging commands this whole time and has never been a problem for me. I think we have many other users who are similar. To be fair, sometimes after watching it install packages with npm, people are surprised and say that they would have preferred that it asked. But usually this is just the initi…
Do you have any sandbox-like restrictions in place to ensure that commands are limited to only touching the project folder not any other places in the system?
You can use pledge[1] to restrict the tool to read/write only in specific directories, or only use certain system calls. This is easier to run than from a container or VM, but can be a bit fiddly to setup at first.
Assuming you trust it with the files in your codebase, and them being shared with third parties. Which is a hard pill to swallow for a proprietary program.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#180Congrats on the launch guys! Tried the product early on and it’s clearly improved a ton. I’m still using Cursor every day mainly because of how complete the feature set is - autocomplete, command K, highlight a function and ask questions about it, and command L / command shift L. I am not sure what it’ll take for me to switch - maybe I’m not an ideal user somehow… I’m working in a relatively simple codebase with few collaborators?
I’m curious what exactly people say causes them to make the switch from Cursor to Codebuff? Or do people just use both?