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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

#71

Post by mpalmer »

swyx wrote: post #57
mpalmer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I co-sign this as a similarly-credentialed person. I use windsurf at work and recently started enjoying Claude Code, but the UX of Windsurf is actually a legit value add. Codemaps especially - been using them for weeks and they're excellent. Ask me again in a year maybe; churn in code could make maintaining codemaps annoying, but even that seems solvable.

appreciate the feedback! just a reminder codemaps are based on snapshots of your code when you run them; technically there's nothing to maintain, because you just rerun them if you need to.

Yep it's low friction, but is it easy to discover that I need to? I guess it's the "needing to know that I need to rerun" that I'm less enthused about.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#72

Post by pxc »

kps wrote: post #43
apstls wrote: post #42

Sounds very cool. I wanted to try this out, so I opened Windsurf for the first time in ages and clicked the "Upgrade Available" button, which sent me to: https://windsurf.com/editor/update-linux Did you install using apt or apt-get? If so... 1. Update package lists sudo apt-get update 2. Upgrade Windsurf sudo apt-get upgrade windsurf Whle `apt-get upgrade windsurf` will technically upgrade Windsurf, instructing users…

So `apt-get upgrade $PACKAGE` has ridiculous semantics that no one would expect, and the actual syntax for upgrading a package is in neither the man page nor the command help.

Sure it is¹ (kinda):

  --no-upgrade
      Do not upgrade packages; when used in conjunction with install, no-upgrade will prevent packages on the command line from being upgraded if they are already installed. Configuration Item: APT::Get::Upgrade.
The canonical way to do the thing you want via apt-get is `apt-get install`. And if you read the man page from start to finish, it'd be clear to you... but it is tucked away there in the most obtuse, indirect, ungreppable way. :'D

That would be a great addendum to an EXAMPLES section! In the meantime, this is documented well and clearly in the tldr page for apt-get².

Fwiw, apt-get not only sucks, but has been known to suck for many, many years (more than a decade at least). Its interface sticks around because it's basically plumbing at this point. But you, as a user, should never use it (or `apt-cache` or `apt-*`, if you can avoid it.

Aptitude is preferable for a whole host of reasons, not least of which being that its upgrade commands have the semantics you'd intuitively expect³. They take packages as an optional list of positional args, and upgrade everything only if you don't pass any. (Aptitude also has a ton of other nice features and I highly recommend it.)

There's also an official new porcelain in APT itself, aptly called "apt". It preserves⁴ the semantics of apt-get's `upgrade` command, but its usage message actually matches that syntactically— hopefully it'll barf if you tell it `apt upgrade windsurf` or whatever.

But automation needs to rely on the ugly, old, disparate APT commands that have been around forever and can't really change. That probably goes, too, for things guides want you to copy and paste, or instructions handed over to LLMs.

(This is one reason that if you only learn to use APT from guides/tutorials whose primary concern is something other than documenting or teaching how to use Debian-based systems, you'll probably never learn to use the correct tools (the nicer, newer ones).)

--

1: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/apt/apt-get.8.en.html

2: https://tldr.inbrowser.app/pages/linux/apt-get

3: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/aptitude/aptitude.8.en.ht...

4: https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/apt/apt.8.en.html

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#73

Post by zamadatix »

apstls wrote: post #42

Sounds very cool. I wanted to try this out, so I opened Windsurf for the first time in ages and clicked the "Upgrade Available" button, which sent me to: https://windsurf.com/editor/update-linux Did you install using apt or apt-get? If so... 1. Update package lists sudo apt-get update 2. Upgrade Windsurf sudo apt-get upgrade windsurf Whle `apt-get upgrade windsurf` will technically upgrade Windsurf, instructing users…

Wow, what's the upside to that syntax? I never would have guessed.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#76

Post by maleldil »

tbillington wrote: post #63
swyx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://tenor.com/view/westworld-if-you-cant-tell-does-it-ma...

If you couldn't tell your food had been cut with sawdust would it matter to you if you found out?

Is the result is molecular identical? If so, no.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#77

Post by codebje »

tbillington wrote: post #63
swyx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://tenor.com/view/westworld-if-you-cant-tell-does-it-ma...

If you couldn't tell your food had been cut with sawdust would it matter to you if you found out?

I really love this comment, it's got a very "tree-falling-in-the-woods" vibe to it.

On the direct face of it, no, it turns out it doesn't matter: plant cellulose is not toxic to humans, a certain level of it is in many processed foods, and that information isn't secret.

By the time it matters to people, it's at the level where you can tell it's happened: large, pointy chunks, eg, or so much the flavour or texture is ruined. Or toxic contaminants, albeit at the significant risk that one might only be able to tell at the point of suffering from the consequences.

But if we modify the proposition a little, we get a statement about the possibility of a vegan's metaphorical sawdust being cut with ground beef. Now, it's more likely to matter. By and large, dietary choices like that are based on some belief structure, so the presence of the unwanted ingredient could be considered as an attack on the belief system.

When we move the metaphor back to AI generated code, does this reveal a belief system at play? If the resulting program is not poor quality, but the use of AI is objectionable nevertheless, does that make a "no AI in software" stance a sort of veganism for code? (And can we coin a good term for that stance? I vote for hominism, because while I quite like anthropism that leads to anthropic which is obviously not going to work.)

Given there's a regulatory number on acceptable bug parts per million for confectionary, is there a hypothetical acceptable bytes per million for AI-generated code that can still be called hoministic?

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#78

Post by potamic »

swyx wrote: post #3

(coauthor) happy to take any questions! see 1 min demo video here https://x.com/cognition/status/1985755284527010167 this is brainchild of cognition cto steven who doesn't like the spotlight but he deserves it for this one https://x.com/stevenkplus1/status/1985767277376241827 if you leave qtns here he'll see it

Do you have any examples/demos for very large codebases? Because it's easy to get decent quality output using LLMs on small codebases. But large, messy codebases is where you really need help with understanding.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#79

Post by latexr »

codebje wrote: post #77
tbillington wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you couldn't tell your food had been cut with sawdust would it matter to you if you found out?

I really love this comment, it's got a very "tree-falling-in-the-woods" vibe to it. On the direct face of it, no, it turns out it doesn't matter: plant cellulose is not toxic to humans, a certain level of it is in many processed foods, and that information isn't secret. By the time it matters to people, it's at the level where you can tell it's happened: large, pointy chunks, eg, or so much the flavour or texture is…

The HN guidelines explicitly ask you to steel man arguments you reply to. It is obvious that the point of the comment is not sawdust specifically; they could have used anything else, like cyanide, and the point would stand. Spending multiple paragraphs of rebuttal on a nitpick which fails to address the crux of the argument is precisely the kind of bad argument the HN guidelines aim to avoid.

Re: Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It

#80

Post by bluelightning2k »

swyx wrote: post #8
bluelightning2k wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less a question and more a strong suggestion: codemaps should be viewable in the main pain. The sidebar is FAR too small. Either default or a button or something to open it like an editor tab.

acked. you can also open it in a browser window for now https://windsurf.com/codemaps/9e2791c4-0b14-4757-b4be-a71488...

Right but you're an IDE and I want to view code (and especially the links) in the IDE.

Hopefully we can get codemaps in the main IDE panel sooner rather than later. Feels like the very impressive thing (codemaps) is being held back by a trivial thing (reading them in a 200px panel) to the point it's impractical to use themm

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