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Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

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Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#21

Post by MisterSandman »

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…

That’s not universally true. I’ve had a better experience with Amazon Q than I’ve had with Cline.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#22

Post by randomchars »

rtuin wrote: post #19

Totally irrelevant on the subject, but the screen recording in the article caught my attention: what tool does one use to create the screen recording with zoom and mouse tracking?

The most popular one is Screen Studio[0], but there are a few alternatives there, like Tella[1].

[0]: https://screen.studio/

[1]: https://landingpage.tella.com/

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#23

Post by noosphr »

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?…

I build these systems for a living, and I just made a post about why code is different from natural text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107379

RAG is useful for natural text because there is no innate logic in how it's structured. RAG chunking based on punctuation for natural language doesn't work well because people use punctuation pretty poorly and the RAG models are too small to learn how they can do it themselves.

Source code, unlike natural text, comes with grammar that must be followed for it to even run. From being able to find a definition deterministically, to having explicit code blocks, you've gotten rid of 90% of the reason why you need chunking and ranking in RAG systems.

Just using etags with a rule that captures all the scope of a function I've gotten much higher than sota results when it comes to working with large existing code bases. Of course the fact I was working in lisp made dealing with code blocks and context essentially trivial. If you want to look at blub languages like python and javascript you need a whole team of engineers to deal with all the syntactic cancer.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#24

Post by neonwatty »

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 limitations of RAG / strengths of a more structured (AST) approach for the case of code are spelled out well. Its punchy and too the point. Don't see these issues.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#25

Post by flashblaze »

randomchars wrote: post #22
rtuin wrote: post #19

Totally irrelevant on the subject, but the screen recording in the article caught my attention: what tool does one use to create the screen recording with zoom and mouse tracking?

The most popular one is Screen Studio[0], but there are a few alternatives there, like Tella[1]. [0]: https://screen.studio/ [1]: https://landingpage.tella.com/

Since I use Windows and Screen Studio is Mac only, I tried Tella and can definitely vouch for it. (I am on their free trial though)

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#26

Post by bryanlarsen »

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.…

Sounds like you're the exception rather than the rule. I've never seen a project with tens of thousands of files worth of accurate documentation. Any project that has that much documentation the majority of it is outdated and/or wrong. Some of it is still useful, but only in a historical context.

The code is the authoritative reference.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#27

Post by esafak »

noosphr wrote: post #23
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?…

I build these systems for a living, and I just made a post about why code is different from natural text: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107379 RAG is useful for natural text because there is no innate logic in how it's structured. RAG chunking based on punctuation for natural language doesn't work well because people use punctuation pretty poorly and the RAG models are too small to learn how they can do it t…

RAG does not just mean similarity search. It means retrieving all relevant content, including the AST dependencies. Whatever you would want to know if you were to answer the query yourself.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#28

Post by beauzero »

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…

I agree. This is the golden tool that doesn't get the hype. Well as golden as tools get. Hope they can keep delivering. It seems to hit my personal sweet spot.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#29

Post by electroly »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26
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.…

Sounds like you're the exception rather than the rule. I've never seen a project with tens of thousands of files worth of accurate documentation. Any project that has that much documentation the majority of it is outdated and/or wrong. Some of it is still useful, but only in a historical context. The code is the authoritative reference.

Sure, I'm a power user with a monster codebase, never said that I wasn't. RAG is a power user feature.

The files are generated from external sources, pulling together as much information as I could collect. It's a script so I can keep it up to date. I think there is roughly no programmer out there who needs to be told that documentation needs to be up-to-date; this is obvious enough that I'm trying not to be offended by your strawman. You could have politely assumed, since I said I have it working, that it does actually work. I am doing productive work with this; it's not theoretical.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#30

Post by NitpickLawyer »

Eh... I'm not convinced. I like cline, I've been using it here and there and I think it found a good mix between "vibesus take the wheel" and "hey, I'm still here and I enjoy doing this". I was particularly surprised that it worked pretty well with local models. A lot of that is on the model (tested w/ devstral) but a lot of it is on the cradle (e.g. aider is great at what it does, but local model support is hit and miss).

First, like some other comments have mentioned RAG is more than result = library.rag(). I get that a lot of people feel RAG is overhyped, but it's important to have the right mind model around it. It is a technique first. A pattern. Whenever you choose what to include in the context you are performing RAG. Retrieve something from somewhere and put it in context. Cline seems to delegate this task to the model via agentic flows, and that's OK. But it's still RAG. The model chooses (via tool calls) what to Retrieve.

I'm also not convinced that embedding can't be productive. I think nick is right to point out some flaws in the current implementations, but that doesn't mean the concept in itself is flawed. You can always improve the flows. I think there's a lot to gain from having embeddings, especially since they capture things that ASTs don't (comments, doc files, etc).

Another aspect is the overall efficiency. If you have somewhat repetitive tasks, you'll do this dance every time. Hey, fix that thing in auth. Well, let's see where's auth. Read file1. Read file2. Read fileN. OK, the issue is in ... You can RAG this whole process once and re-use (some) of this computation. Or you can do "graphRAG" and do this heavy lifting once per project and have AST + graph + model dump that can be RAGd. There's a lot of cool things you can do.

In general I don't think we know enough about the subject, best practices and useful flows to confidently say "NO, never, nuh-huuh". I think there might be value there, and efficiencies to be gained, and some of them seem like really low hanging fruit. Why not take them?

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