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Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

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Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#41

Post by johnisgood »

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 are the options?

Cursor, Zed, Cline (VSCode), and anything else?

I have not tried either. I wanted to try Cursor but it has a bug that is a blocker.

My workflow involves manual copying and pasting from the browser into my own text editor.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#42

Post by olejorgenb »

I've been wondering when someone would finally use the actual code structure to do RAG. It seems like such an obvious, if somewhat harder (at least if you need to support many languages), approach.

The vector/keyword based RAG results I've seen so far for large code bases (my experience is Cody) has been quite bad. For a smaller projects (using Cursor) it seems to work quite well though.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#43

Post by vunderba »

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/

Screen Studio is fantastic and unlike a lot of other commercial screen recorders has a one-time purchase cost (though you can also pay monthly).

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#44

Post by k__ »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #39
k__ wrote: post #37

Cursor does it. Cline doesn't. Aider goes the middle way with repo maps. Let's see what works best.

What's the difference between Aider's repo map and the Cline AST? Sounds like a small difference in implementation than a difference in concept.

I think, the repomap is an AST that doesn't go down all the way.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#45

Post by electroly »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #38
electroly wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 documentation I assumed you meant internal documentation, like on a company Wiki. External documentation is presumably already in the LLM's training data, so it should be extraneous to pull it into context. Obviously there's a huge difference between "should be" and "is" otherwise you wouldn't be putting in the work to pull it into context.

I'd guess the breakdown is about:

- 80%: Information about databases. Schemas, sample rows, sample SQL usages (including buried inside string literals and obscured by ORMs), comments, hand-written docs. I collect everything I can find about each table/view/procedure and stick it in a file named after it.

- 10%: Swagger JSONs for internal APIs I have access to, plus sample responses.

- 10%: Public API documentation that it should know but doesn't.

The last 10% isn't nothing; I shouldn't have to do that and it's as you say. I've particularly had problems with Apple's documentation; higher than expected hallucunation rate in Swift when I don't provide the docs explicitly. Their docs require JavaScript (and don't work with Cursor's documentation indexing feature) which gives me a hunch about what might have happened. It was a pain in the neck for me to scrape it. I expect this part to go away as tooling gets better.

The first 90% I expect to be replaced by better MCP tools over time, which integrate vector indexing along with traditional indexing/exploration techniques. I've got one written to allow AI to interactively poke around the database, but I've found it's not as effective as the vector index.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#46

Post by nick-baumann »

jeffchuber wrote: post #3

This is still retrieval and RAG, just not vector search and indexing. it’s incredibly important to be clear about terms - and this article does not meet the mark.

Fair point Jeff -- you're right that we're still doing retrieval. The key distinction is how we retrieve.

Traditional RAG for code uses vector embeddings and similarity search. We use filesystem traversal and AST parsing - following imports, tracing dependencies, reading files in logical order. It's retrieval guided by code structure rather than semantic similarity.

I highly recommend checking out what the Claude Code team discovered (48:00 https://youtu.be/zDmW5hJPsvQ?si=wdGyiBGqmo4YHjrn&t=2880). They initially experimented with RAG using embeddings but found that giving the agent filesystem tools to explore code naturally delivered significantly better results.

From our experience, vector similarity often retrieves fragments that mention the right keywords but miss the actual implementation logic. Following code structure retrieves the files a developer would actually need to understand the problem.

So yes -- I should have been clearer about the terminology. It's not "no retrieval" -- it's structured retrieval vs similarity-based retrieval. And with today's frontier models having massive context windows and sophisticated reasoning capabilities, they're perfectly designed to build understanding by exploring code the way developers do, rather than needing pre-digested embeddings.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#47

Post by phillipcarter »

nick-baumann wrote: post #46
jeffchuber wrote: post #3

This is still retrieval and RAG, just not vector search and indexing. it’s incredibly important to be clear about terms - and this article does not meet the mark.

Fair point Jeff -- you're right that we're still doing retrieval. The key distinction is how we retrieve. Traditional RAG for code uses vector embeddings and similarity search. We use filesystem traversal and AST parsing - following imports, tracing dependencies, reading files in logical order. It's retrieval guided by code structure rather than semantic similarity. I highly recommend checking out what the Claude Cod…

Probably good to add a disclaimer at the top that clarifies the definition, since RAG is ultimately just a pattern, and vector indexes are just one way to implement the pattern.

Indeed, industry at large sees RAG as equivalent to "vector indexes and cosine similarity w.r.t. input query", and the rest of the article explains thoroughly why that's not the right approach.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#48

Post by WaltPurvis »

behnamoh wrote: post #12

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.

>Not to mention most of it basically died when most models started supporting +1M context.

Do most models support that much context? I don't think anything close to "most" models support 1M+ context. I'm only aware of Gemini, but I'd love to learn about others.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#49

Post by atonse »

cdelsolar wrote: post #13

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 pr…

I've always wondered... Making agents edits (like vibe coding), all the tools I've tried (Cursor, Zed, VSCode) are pretty equal since most of the brains are in the underlying models themselves.

But the killer app that keeps me using Cursor is Cursor Tab, which helps you WHILE you code.

Whatever model they have for that works beautifully for me, whereas Zed's autocomplete model is the last thing that keeps me away from it.

What do Cline users use for the inline autocomplete model?

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