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Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

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Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#51

Post by nlh »

atonse wrote: post #49
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 fro…

I use Cline within Cursor — best of both worlds!

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#52

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #48
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.

GPT 4.1 / mini / nano

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#53

Post by anukin »

ramoz wrote: post #40

I kept wondering why Cursor was indexing my codebase, it was never clear. Anyway context to me enables a lot more assurance and guarantees. RAG never did. My favorite workflow right now is: - Create context with https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower - Feed it to Gemini - Gemini Plans - I pass the plan into my local PM framework - Claude Code picks it up and executes - repeat

How does this work?

It’s not clear how context is used to plan by Gemini then the plan is fed to local framework. Do I have to replan every time context changes?

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#54

Post by arthur-st »

olejorgenb wrote: post #42

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.

Aider has been doing that for a long time now, it was the first project to do this afaik.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#55

Post by consumer451 »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #52
WaltPurvis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

GPT 4.1 / mini / nano

As the context grows, all LLMs appear to turn into idiots, even just at 32k!

> We evaluate 12 popular LLMs that claim to support contexts of at least 128K tokens. While they perform well in short contexts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107536

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#56

Post by WhitneyLand »

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.

The article reads fine to me.

Yes by technicality RAG could mean any retrieval, but in practice when people use the term it’s almost always referring to some sort of vector embedding and similarity searching.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#57

Post by ramesh31 »

johnisgood wrote: post #41
ramesh31 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Cline with mcp-playwright: https://github.com/executeautomation/mcp-playwright

There is no free tier like other tools, but it's far more transparent in that regard; it uses an Anthropic/OpenAI/etc. API key directly, and your only costs are direct token usage.

The real "aha" moment with this kind of thing is in realizing that the agent can not just use the tool as provided, but it can write scripts to dynamically execute on the page as well. So it's not just going to a page and dumping a bunch of HTML back into the client; it actually analyzes the DOM structure and writes JS snippets to extract relevant information which are then executed in the browser's runtime.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#58

Post by Tycho »

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…

Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you use an LLM to generate this reply? The reply is good, but the writing style just piqued my curiosity.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#59

Post by woah »

anukin wrote: post #53
ramoz wrote: post #40

I kept wondering why Cursor was indexing my codebase, it was never clear. Anyway context to me enables a lot more assurance and guarantees. RAG never did. My favorite workflow right now is: - Create context with https://github.com/backnotprop/prompt-tower - Feed it to Gemini - Gemini Plans - I pass the plan into my local PM framework - Claude Code picks it up and executes - repeat

How does this work? It’s not clear how context is used to plan by Gemini then the plan is fed to local framework. Do I have to replan every time context changes?

They use a tool like the one they linked to put all their files into one file that they give to gemini.

Then they put the plan into their "PM framework" (some markdown files?) to have Claude Code pick tasks out of.

Re: Why Cline doesn't index your codebase

#60

Post by jjani »

The security argument is a valid one, as long as the prompts aren't passing through Cline's servers but instead directly sent to the LLM providers. If they go through an intermediary step, it's a pretty pointless difference. Yet it's very hard to make money off of a coding assistant where the prompts don't pass through their servers in one way or form. Cline is for-profit and currently their only monetization is to get users to use their credits system, meaning prompts go through them. In other words, if Cline is to succeed and monetize you, the security advantage sounds questionable.

This is a hilariously obvious LLM sentence by the way:

> Your codebase isn't just text – it's your competitive advantage

When creating articles aimed at LLM power users (which this one is), just have a human write it. We can see through the slop. Come on, you're VC backed, if you were bootstrapping I wouldn't even be calling this out.

The other arguments I used to agree with - compression and RAG means loss of quality, increasing context windows and decreasing prices means you should just send a lot of context.

Then I tried Augment and their indexing/RAG just works, period, so now I'm not convinced anymore.

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