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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

#221

Post by mulle_nat »

sagarpatil wrote: post #194

$99/month lol. I have Perplexity, OpenAI, Claude and Cursor subscription and I end up paying way less than $99/month. Clearly you haven't done any research on price. Aider, Cline are open source, in not sure why someone would subscribe to it unless it's the top model on http://swebench.com/

I tried it on two of my git repositories, just to see, if it could do a decent commit summary. I was very pleasantly surprised with the good result. I was unpleasantly surprised, that this already cost me 175 credits. If I extrapolate this over my ~100 repositories, that would already put me at 8750, just to let it write a commit message for release day. That is way out of free range and basically would eat up most of the $99 I would have to spend as well. My subscription price for cody is $8 for a month. Pricing seems just way off.

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

#223

Post by eraad »

Manicode is really awesome, did some actual dev for live apps and it does work.

You must though, learn to code in a different way if you are not that disciplined. I had excellent results asking for small changes, step by step and committing often so I can undo and go back to a working version easily.

Net result was very positive, built two apps simultaneously (customer side and professional side).

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

#224

Post by dartos »

tgtweak wrote: post #191
dartos wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would consider myself adept at all three, not top 1% in either but the intersection of all 3 easily. Context I have hired hundreds of engineers and built many engineering teams from scratch to 50+, and have been doing systems administration, solutions architecture, infrastructure design, devops, cloud orchestration and data platform design for 25 years. I'm not bluffing when I say Claude's latest sonnet model and C…

I haven’t built engineering teams, but I’ve been in the server programming field for 15 years.

I have tried Claude (with aider) for programming tasks and have been impressed that it could do anything (with handholding) but haven’t been convinced that it’s something that will change how I write code forever.

It’s nice that I can describe how to graph some data in a csv and get 80% of the way there in python after a few rounds of clarification. Claude refused to use seaborn for some reason, but that’s no big deal.

Every time I’ve tried using it for work, though, I was sorely disappointed.

I recently convinced myself that it was pretty helpful in building a yjs backed text editor, but last week realized that it led me down an incorrect path with regards to the prosemirror plugin and I had to rewrite a good chunk of the code.

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

#225

Post by redman25 »

jahooma wrote: post #192
Terretta wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're missing anything. Aider tends to maintain near "state of the art" including e.g. treesitter, and an actually refined (as in, iterated improvements over time) user experience. Aider has been refining for 8000 commits since May of 2023. Codebuff "all started" circa Claude Sonnet 3.5. The story of discovery (e.g. git patch) at best feels like a lack of researching the landscape since leaderboards fo…

Thanks for your reply! I started Codebuff without being aware of Aider. I actually have not yet tried Aider (though I plan to try it soon!). It's totally true that a lot of the development of Codebuff is merely me (and Brandon) working through a lot of the problems that Aider already solved! That makes sense. Partly, my thesis is that if you start after Sonnet 3.5 is out, that you design things differently. For examp…

> With respect to privacy, we have pledged not to store your codebase [...]

It isn't necessarily a strong guarantee to have "pledged", although it is appreciated.

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

#226

Post by dartos »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #154
dartos wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prett…

> Sure but it's not high at all.

It depends. For a sysadmin maybe not, but for data scientists, the bar would be pretty high just to understand the math jargon.

> If perplexity can tell you exactly what to do 90% of the time without error

That “if” is carrying a lot of weight. Anecdotally I haven’t seen any llm be correct 90% of the time. IIRC SOTA on swebench (which tbf isn’t a great benchmark) is around 30%.

> flawless write-eval loops with the help of cline, cline is a pretty good programmer.

I’m not really sure what you mean by “flawless” but having a rubber duck is always more helpful than harmful.

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

Like what?

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

#227

Post by dilap »

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…

I did find codebuff a lot easier to install and get started with...usability can make or break a project. Just as a user, I think it's nice to have multiple projects doing the same thing -- exploring more of the solution space.

(I've just played a little bit with aider and codebuff. I've previously tried aider and it always errored out on my code base, but inspired by this comment I tried again, and now it works well.)

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

#229

Post by iknownthing »

Oras wrote: post #217
bunnyman wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Being in the same product space for more than 3 months, I wonder how one can not come across 2 popular open source tools that do more or less the same thing. Like Aider has 21k stars, and Cline has around 11k stars. Both these product names come up on HN, Reddit frequently. Curious to know if YC does some research on existing products before backing a new business.

In any YC application, they request a list of competitors and why your product is better! Curious about what OP listed as competitors in the application.

Maybe the person reading the application was not aware of the competition either.

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

#230

Post by abossy »

> I fine-tuned GPT-4o to turn Claude's sketch of changes into a git patch, which would add and remove lines to make the edits. I only finished generating the training data late at night, and the fine-tuning job ran as I slept

Could you say more about this? What was the entirety of your training data, exactly, and how did the sketch of changes and git patch play into that?

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