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Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

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Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#41

Post by danenania »

jtwaleson wrote: post #22

Nice! I tried it out when you launched last year but found it pretty expensive to use. I believe I spent $5 for half an hour of coding or so. Can you share what the typical costs are now, since the model prices have changed significantly?

It's a bit hard to give "typical" costs because it's so dependent on how you use it. The project map size (which scales with overall project size) and the number/size of relevant files are the main drivers of cost, so working in large existing codebases will be a lot more expensive than generating a new app from scratch.

Taking Plandex's codebase as an example, it's certainly not huge but is getting to be decent-sized—I just ran a count and it's at about 200k lines (mostly Go), which translates to a project map of ~43k tokens. I have a task in progress right now to add a json config file for model settings and other project settings. To get to a pretty good initial version of this feature, I first did a fair amount of back-and-forth in 'chat mode' to pin down the details (maybe 10 or so prompts) and then an implementation phase where ~15 files were updated. The cost so far is at a little under $10.

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#42

Post by gcanyon »

> It has an effective context window of 2M tokens, and can index projects of 20M tokens and beyond using tree-sitter project maps (30+ languages are supported). It can effectively find relevant context in massive million-line projects like SQLite, Redis, and Git.

Does this possibly have non-coding-related utility for general reasoning about large volumes of text?

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#43

Post by danenania »

lightdot wrote: post #40

From the Github page: "curl -sL https://plandex.ai/install.sh | bash" Enticing users to blindly run remote 3rd party code on their machines is IMHO not a proper thing to do. This approach creates a dangerous mindset when it comes to security and good practices in general.

You can read the script before installing. It's pretty straightforward—just grabs the appropriate binary from GitHub and puts it in /usr/local/bin.

Installing via package managers or installers also runs remote 3rd party code on your machine, so I don't see much difference from a security perspective. You should make sure you trust the source before installing anything.

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#44

Post by danenania »

gcanyon wrote: post #42

> It has an effective context window of 2M tokens, and can index projects of 20M tokens and beyond using tree-sitter project maps (30+ languages are supported). It can effectively find relevant context in massive million-line projects like SQLite, Redis, and Git. Does this possibly have non-coding-related utility for general reasoning about large volumes of text?

The project map supports markdown files (and html), so you could definitely use it to explore docs, notes, etc. if they're all in markdown/html. Plaintext files aren't currently mapped though, so just the file name would be used to determine whether to load those.

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#45

Post by danenania »

Yiling-J wrote: post #33

I noticed there's an example in the docs: plandex rm app/**/*.ts # by glob pattern. However, looking at the code ( https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex/blob/main/app/cli/cmd/... ), it seems you're using path/filepath for pattern matching, which doesn't support double star patterns. Here's a playground example showing that: https://go.dev/play/p/n8mFpJn-9iY

Thanks for flagging—I'll take a look at this.

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#46

Post by danenania »

MadsRC wrote: post #31

This looks great! With the self-host option, it’s not really clear through the docs if one is able to override the base url of the different model providers? I’m running my own OpenAI, Anthropic, Vertex and Bedrock compatible API, can I have it use that instead?

Thanks!

Yes, you can add 'custom models' and set the base url. More on this here: https://docs.plandex.ai/models/model-settings

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#47

Post by danenania »

sagarpatil wrote: post #26

I spend hours everyday researching AI products. Why am I only hearing about plandex now? Looks very promising, I’ll give it a try. Please up your marketing game, the product looks solid!

Thanks! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

> Please up your marketing game, the product looks solid!

Working on it!

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#49

Post by danenania »

nidnogg wrote: post #38
victor9000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI/UX is one of the last things I'm worried about when leveraging generative tools. When I need to inspect what the model has done, a quick git diff does the trick.

Good luck with a quick git diff spanning thousands of lines. AI code can be notoriously verbose and over engineered. Of course you want to be in control.

Just to note, apart from git diff style diffs, Plandex also offers a web UI for side-by-side diff comparison—similar to GitHub's PR review UI.

Re: Show HN: Plandex v2 – open source AI coding agent for large projects and tasks

#50

Post by danenania »

ako wrote: post #30

Interesting to see that even with these type of tools coding it takes 8 months. That is not the general impression people have of ai assisted coding. Any thoughts on how you could improve plandex to bring down 8 months to 1 month or less?

Another way to think about it is the 8 months of work I did would have taken years without help from AI tools (including Plandex itself).
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