well, most of the time, I just dump the entire codebase in if the context window is big and its a good model. But there are plenty of times when I need to block one folder in a repo or disable a few files because the files might "nudge" it in a wrong direction.
The surgical context tool (aicodeprep-gui) - there are at least 30 similar tools but most (if not all) are CLI only/no UI. I like UIs, I work faster with them for things like choosing individual files out of a big tree (at least it is using PySide6 library which is "lite" (could go lighter maybe), i HATE that too many things use webview/browsers. All the options on it are there for good reasons, its all focused on things that annoy me..and slow things down: like doing something repeatedly (copy paste copy paste or typing the same sentence over and over every time i have to do a certain thing with the AI and my code.
If you have not run 'aicp' (the command i gave it, but also there is a OS installer menu that will add a Windows/Mac/Linux right click context menu in their file managers) in a folder before, it will try to scan recursively to find code files, but it skips things like node_modules or .venv. but otherwise assumes most types of code files will probably be added so it checks them. You can fine tune it, add some .md or txt files or stuff in there that isn't code but might be helpful. When you generate the context block it puts the text inside the prompt box on the top AND/OR bottom - doing both can get better responses from AI.
It saves every file that is checked, and saves the window size, other window prefs, so you don't have to resize the window again. It saves the state of which files are checked so its less work / time next time. I have been just pasting the output from the LLMs into an agent like Cline but I am wondering if I should add browser automation / browser extension that does the copy pasting and also add option to edit / change files right after grabbing the output from a web chat. Its probably about good enough as it is though, not sure I want to make it into a big thing.
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Yeah I just keep coming back to this workflow, its very reliable. I have not tried Claude Code yet but I will soon to see if they solved any of these problems.
Strange this thing has been at the top of hacker news for hours and hours.. weird! My server logs are just constant scrolling