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Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

cognition.ai

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Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#11

Post by all2 »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #2

I really think more people should give Windsurf a go. It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding and I really think people are looking past Windsurf. As the conversation shifted towards Cursor vs Claude code vs Codex people seem to have stopped mentioning it which is a shame. Source: user for 12 months - not a shill. Codemaps was a very pleasant surprise when it showed up.

This is enough for me to give this a go. I've tried a few different tools; abacus.ai (and their IDE), claude CLI, crush-cli. My workflows are still mostly on the command line, and a little in VS Code. I haven't found a flow that works "right", yet.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#14

Post by rmonvfer »

This looks awesome. I’m a very heavy Claude Code user (and Codex) in both the CLI and VS Code (and now in the web too!) and it’s quite infuriating when the agent just gets lost after context compaction and I have to point it to read CLAUDE/AGENTS.md (and update it if a lot of changes have been made)

I tried Windsurf a while back but I’ll definitely come back ASAP just to play with this and see how it does in a somewhat complex project I’m working on.

Kudos to the team!

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#15

Post by asdev »

A feature like this isn't useful because knowing what connects to what, dependencies, etc. means nothing without business context. AI will never know the why behind the architecture, it will only take it at face value. I think technical design docs which have some context and reading the code is more than enough. This sits in the middle ground where it lacks the context of a doc and is less detailed than the code.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#16

Post by dingnuts »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #2

I really think more people should give Windsurf a go. It's really good. I'm a senior engineer and do a mix of agentic and regular coding and I really think people are looking past Windsurf. As the conversation shifted towards Cursor vs Claude code vs Codex people seem to have stopped mentioning it which is a shame. Source: user for 12 months - not a shill. Codemaps was a very pleasant surprise when it showed up.

I've used it, and I thought it was absolute trash. Goes crazy doing shit I don't want. I spend more time deleting crap I didn't want and reviewing and changing its code than I do just writing it myself.

I know what you're going to say: I need to learn to use this groundbreaking technology that is so easy to use that my product manager will soon be doing my job but also is too hard for me a senior engineer, to find value in.

Kindly: no, I trust my judgement, and the data backs me up.

Have you taken measurements of how many features and bugs you've shipped over the last twelve months or are you just like the engineers in the METR study who self reported an improvement but when measured, had been impaired? What evidence do you have that your attitude is not simply informed by the sunk cost of your subscription?

Please share your data below

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#17

Post by CharlesW »

asdev wrote: post #15

A feature like this isn't useful because knowing what connects to what, dependencies, etc. means nothing without business context. AI will never know the why behind the architecture, it will only take it at face value. I think technical design docs which have some context and reading the code is more than enough. This sits in the middle ground where it lacks the context of a doc and is less detailed than the code.

> AI will never know the why behind the architecture…

That's true only if you don't provide that context. The answer is: Do provide that context. My experience is that LLM output will be influenced and improved by the why's you provide.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#18

Post by dingnuts »

CharlesW wrote: post #17
asdev wrote: post #15

A feature like this isn't useful because knowing what connects to what, dependencies, etc. means nothing without business context. AI will never know the why behind the architecture, it will only take it at face value. I think technical design docs which have some context and reading the code is more than enough. This sits in the middle ground where it lacks the context of a doc and is less detailed than the code.

> AI will never know the why behind the architecture… That's true only if you don't provide that context. The answer is: Do provide that context. My experience is that LLM output will be influenced and improved by the why's you provide.

it takes longer to explain the context to the model than it does to just write the code based on the context I already understand, especially since code is more terse than natural language

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#19

Post by asdev »

CharlesW wrote: post #17
asdev wrote: post #15

A feature like this isn't useful because knowing what connects to what, dependencies, etc. means nothing without business context. AI will never know the why behind the architecture, it will only take it at face value. I think technical design docs which have some context and reading the code is more than enough. This sits in the middle ground where it lacks the context of a doc and is less detailed than the code.

> AI will never know the why behind the architecture… That's true only if you don't provide that context. The answer is: Do provide that context. My experience is that LLM output will be influenced and improved by the why's you provide.

if you know that context, you don't need a codemap

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#20

Post by Jaxan »

dingnuts wrote: post #18
CharlesW wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI will never know the why behind the architecture… That's true only if you don't provide that context. The answer is: Do provide that context. My experience is that LLM output will be influenced and improved by the why's you provide.

it takes longer to explain the context to the model than it does to just write the code based on the context I already understand, especially since code is more terse than natural language

But wouldn’t the context also be useful, in written form, to colleagues?
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