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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

#21

Post by fizx »

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

Definitely, iff you have to provide the context with every task. If agent memory worked better and across your whole team, then providing context might be much easier

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#23

Post by swyx »

all2 wrote: post #11
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.

first mention i've heard of abacus.ai and IDE. what do you think stands out about them?

you might struggle with Windsurf since you're so command line heavy. but pro tip - ask for command line work to be done inside of Windsurf's Cascade agent. they were first to the terminal-inside-aichat pattern and i really like how it's much better at command line stuff than i am (or can do the legwork to specify command line commands based on a few english descriptions)

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#24

Post by swyx »

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.

you might be surprised how much business context leaks into a codebase and that's plenty to work on :)

https://deepwiki.com/search/vimfnfnname-lets-you-call-neov_e...

but also how much you kinda dont need it when you're just debugging code

https://windsurf.com/codemaps/87532afd-092d-401d-aa3f-0121c7...

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#25

Post by gslepak »

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 prefer IDEs like Zed that don't lock me in to their ecosystem and force me to "log in" to use them.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#26

Post by baq »

asdev wrote: post #19
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.

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

this is possible if you have a couple two-pizza teams. beyond that, good luck.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#27

Post by philippta »

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.

To add to that, a lot of business context is stuck in people‘s heads. To reach the level of a human engineer, the coding agent would have to autonomously reach out and ask them directed questions.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#28

Post by ghurtado »

dingnuts wrote: post #16
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 va…

[flagged]

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#29

Post by asdev »

swyx wrote: post #24
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.

you might be surprised how much business context leaks into a codebase and that's plenty to work on :) https://deepwiki.com/search/vimfnfnname-lets-you-call-neov_e... but also how much you kinda dont need it when you're just debugging code https://windsurf.com/codemaps/87532afd-092d-401d-aa3f-0121c7...

agree that AI can kinda infer business context sometimes. in my experience, it doesn't work that well.

a lot of the time, debugging isn't a logic issue, but more of a state exploration issue. hence you need to add logging to see the inputs of what's going on, just seeing a control flow isn't super useful. maybe codemaps could simulate some inputs in a flow which would be super cool, but probably quite hard to do.

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