We already have AIDE, Continue, Cody , Aider, Cursor.. Why this?
None of them are owned by the creator of Codebuff. Why not create something to replace or be at the same level as those? Also, who is "we"? I don't use or like none of these.
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
#242Earlier 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.
Here's my application: https://manicode.notion.site/Manicode-YC-application-c52f592...
I listed: Cursor, Devin, Codium, Augment, Greptile, Lovable.dev, Aider.chat, mentat.ai, devlo.ai, etc
So I did mention Aider. I was definitely aware that it existed, I just hadn't used it.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds minor that it finds files for you, but if you try it out, you'll see that it's a giant leap in UX and the extra files help it generate better code because it has more examples from your codebase.
But you said you haven't tried Aider, how can you say it's a "leap in UX"? My own tool `gptme` lets the agent interactively read/collect context too (as does Anthropic in their latest minimal-harness submission to SWE-bench), it's nothing novel.
I'm just saying what users of Codebuff have said about us compared to competitors.
You should try Codebuff and see for yourself how it reads files! It's not simply a tool call. We put a lot of work into it.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#244How is this different from Qodo?
Why isn’t it mentioned as a competitor?
I’ve hard time figuring out what codebuff brings to the table that hasn’t been done before other than being YC backed. I think to win in this massively competitive and fast moving market, you really have to put forward something significantly better than an expensive cobbled together script replicating OSS solutions…
I know this sounds harsh, but believe me, differentiation makes or breaks you sooner than later. Proper differentiation doesn’t have to be hard, it just needs to answer the question what you offer that I can’t get anywhere else at a similar price point. Right now, your offer is more expensive for basically something I get elsewhere better for 1/5 the price… I’m seriously worried whether your venture will be around in one or two years from now without a more convincing value prop.
From my experience of leaning more into full end to end Ai workflows building Rust, it seems that
1) context has clearly won over RAG. There is no way back.
2) workflow is the next obvious evolution and gets you an extra mile
3) adversial GAN training seems a path forward to get from just okay generated code to something close to a home run on the first try
4) generating a style guide based on the entire code base and feeding that style guide together with the task and context into the LLM is your ticket to enterprise customers because no matter how good your stuff might be , if the generated code doesn’t fit the mold you are not part of the conversation. Conversely, if you deliver code in the same style and formatting and it actually works, well, price doesn’t matter much.
5) in terms of marketing to developers, I suggest starting listening to their pain points working with existing Ai tools. I don’t have one single of the problems you try to solve. Im sitting over a massive Rust monorepo and I’ve seen virtually every existing Ai coding assistant failing one way or another. The one I have now works miracles half the time and only fails the other half. That is already a massive improvement compared to everything else I tried over the past four years.
Point is, there is a massive need for coding assistance on complex systems and for CodeBuff to make a dime of a difference, you have to differentiate from what’s out there by starting with the challenges engineers face today.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#245How is this different from Qodo? Why isn’t it mentioned as a competitor? I’ve hard time figuring out what codebuff brings to the table that hasn’t been done before other than being YC backed. I think to win in this massively competitive and fast moving market, you really have to put forward something significantly better than an expensive cobbled together script replicating OSS solutions… I know this sounds harsh, bu…
Yes, but did you try it? I think Codebuff is by far the easiest to use and may also be more effective in your large codebase than any other comparable tool (i.e. like Cursor composer, Aider, Cline. Not sure about Qodo) because it is better at finding the appropriate files.
Re: style guide. We encourage you to write up `knowledge.md` files which are included in every prompt. You can specify styles or other guidelines to follow in your codebase. One motivating example is we wrote in instructions of how to add an endpoint (edit these three files), and that made it do the right thing when asked to create an endpoint.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pro…
> 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.
As a Pepsi drinker (Though Pepsi Max/Zero), I disagree with this. That's one interpretation, the other is the one Pepsi was gesturing at - that people prefer Coke when knowing it's Coke, because of branding, but with branding removed, prefer Pepsi.
I personally drank Coke Zero for years, always being "unhappy" when a restaurant only had Pepsi, until one day I realized I was actually enjoying the Pepsi more when not thinking about it, and that the only reason I "preferred" Coke was the brand. So I know that this story can also be true, at least on n=1 examples.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of things AI is helping with also have good, easy to observe / generate, real-time metrics you can use to judge excellence. Exactly what I illustrated earlier: your developer productivity metrics. If you're turning code around faster, setting up your network better, turning around insights faster, the AI is working. > It depends. For a sysadmin maybe not, but for data scientists, the bar would be pretty high…
Wow… why’d you get so defensive and presumptuous? I have my opinion, it’s just not the same as yours.
Label it what you want, I'm responding directly to questions you posed.
> I have my opinion, it’s just not the same as yours.
This is literally the TL;DR for what I wrote.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#248Speaking of naming: did you guys see this one? https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08866
And this: https://github.com/antlr/codebuff