Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

cline.bot

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 131 posts

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#11

Post by chime »

electroly wrote: post #8

I'm not convinced--codebase indexing is still a killer feature in Cursor. I have tens of thousands of reference files stashed in the project directory to be indexed so that any time the model reaches out to the codebase search tool with a question, it finds a file with the answer. Lots of it is not code and has no AST representation; it's documentation. Without codebase indexing, it may entirely miss the context. 1.…

Same with Augment. Indexing makes a huge difference in a large monorepo and I can't imagine working in an editor that doesn't support an LLM with full indexing.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#12

Post by behnamoh »

I never had good experience with RAG anyway, and it felt "hacky". Not to mention most of it basically died when most models started supporting +1M context.

LLMs are already stochastic. I don't want yet another layer of randomness on top.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#13

Post by cdelsolar »

Cline is the most impressive agentic coder tool I’ve used and it seems to be getting better. I’ve learned to work with it to the extent where I can plan with it for 10-15 minutes, set it loose on my codebase, go get lunch, and then its diff is almost always completely on the money. You should commit often for those rare cases where it goes off the rails (which seems to happen less frequently now).

Using Gemini 2.5 pro is also pretty cheap, I think they figured out prompt caching because it definitely was not cheap when it came out.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#14

Post by cdelsolar »

ramesh31 wrote: post #10
deepdarkforest wrote: post #4

Terrible stuff and a reddish flag. First of all, gpt signs all over the blog post, reads like a bottom of the barrel linkedin post. But more importantly, why double and triple down on no RAG? As with most techniques, it has its merits in certain scenarios. I understand getting VC money so you have to prove differentiation and conviction in your approach, but why do it like this? What if RAG does end up being useful?…

Cline is, hands down, the most effective agentic coding tool out there. I've extensively daily driven any one of them you can name, and there's nothing even close. The reality is that no one knows how any of this stuff should work, and RAG is just a term that was made up a few years ago; it has no strict formal definition. There's a long way to go before anyone knows what the correct way to do things should be, but t…

What's incredible to me is that it's open source. I've learned a ton about prompting and agent workflows, tool use, etc. from its code.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#16

Post by nico »

They could still RAG the AST and just use different chunking strategies

It doesn’t seems like what they are doing necessarily replaced RAG, even if it can

The times I’ve implemented RAG, I’ve seen an immediate significant improvement in the answers provided by the model

Maybe they need some metrics to properly assess RAG vs no-RAG

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#17

Post by marcellus23 »

deepdarkforest wrote: post #4

Terrible stuff and a reddish flag. First of all, gpt signs all over the blog post, reads like a bottom of the barrel linkedin post. But more importantly, why double and triple down on no RAG? As with most techniques, it has its merits in certain scenarios. I understand getting VC money so you have to prove differentiation and conviction in your approach, but why do it like this? What if RAG does end up being useful?…

The post may not be written very well (although it seems mostly fine to me) but it doesn't seem GPT-written at all. Especially as it has obvious typos that LLMs don't make:

> ...and this choice isn't an oversight's a fundamental design decision that delivers better code quality, stronger security, and more reliable results

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#18

Post by rtfeldman »

electroly wrote: post #8

I'm not convinced--codebase indexing is still a killer feature in Cursor. I have tens of thousands of reference files stashed in the project directory to be indexed so that any time the model reaches out to the codebase search tool with a question, it finds a file with the answer. Lots of it is not code and has no AST representation; it's documentation. Without codebase indexing, it may entirely miss the context. 1.…

A better argument against vector embeddings for AI code agents is that model performance degrades with number of tokens used (even when well below the context window limit), and vector chunks are more prone to bloating the context window with unhelpful noise than more targeted search techniques.

Claude Code doesn't do vector indexing, and neither does Zed. There aren't any rigorous studies comparing these tools, but you can find plenty of anecdotes of people preferring the output of Claude Code and/or Zed to Cursor's, and search technique is certainly a factor there!

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#20

Post by [deleted] »

deepdarkforest wrote: post #4

Terrible stuff and a reddish flag. First of all, gpt signs all over the blog post, reads like a bottom of the barrel linkedin post. But more importantly, why double and triple down on no RAG? As with most techniques, it has its merits in certain scenarios. I understand getting VC money so you have to prove differentiation and conviction in your approach, but why do it like this? What if RAG does end up being useful?…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN