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Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
91–100 of 248 posts
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#92Allowing LLMs to execute unrestricted commands without human review is risky and insecure.
Yes, this is a good point. I think not asking to run commands is maybe the most controversial choice we've made so far. The reason we don't ask for human review is simply: we've found that it works fine to not ask. We've had a few hundred users so far and usually people are skeptical of this at first, but as they use it they find that they don't want it to ask for every command. It enables cool use cases where Codebu…
I am not afraid of rm -rf whole directory. I am afraid of other stuff that it can do to my machines. leak my ssh keys, cookies, persnal data, network devices, and making persistent modifications (malware) to my system. Or maybe inadvertently messing with my python version, or globally installing some library to mess up whole system.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#93Very excited for codebuff, its been a huge productivity boost for me! I've been putting it to use on a monorepo that has Go, Typescript, terraform and some sql and it always looks at the right files for the task. I like the UX way better than cursor - I like reviewing all changes at once and making minor tweaks when necessary. Especially for writing Go, i love being able to stick with Goland IDE while using codebuff.
Thanks for being one of our early users and dealing with our bugs! I love that we can fit into so many developers' workflows and support them where _they are_, as opposed to forcing them to use us for everything.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1; Ideally I want a tool I don't have to specify the context for. If I can point it via config files at my medium-sized codebase once (~2000 py files; 300k LOC according to `cloc`) then it starts to get actually usable. Cursor Composer doesn't handle that and seems geared towards a small handful of handpicked files. Would codebuff be able to handle a proper sized codebase? Or do the models fundamentally not handle t…
Yes. Natively, the models are limited to 200k tokens which is on the order of dozens of files, which is way too small. But Codebuff has a whole preliminary step where it searches your codebase to find relevant files to your query, and only those get added to the coding agent's context. That's why I think it should work up to medium-large codebases. If the codebase is too large, then our file-finding step will also st…
What's the fundamental limitation to context size here? Why can't a model be fine-tuned per codebase, taking the entire code into context (and be continuously trained as it's updated)?
Forgive my naivety, I don't now anything about LLMs.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
We actually don't use RAG! It's not that good as you say. We build a description of the codebase including the file tree and parsed function names and class names, and then just ask Haiku which files are relevant! This works much better and doesn't require slowly creating an index. You can just run Codebuff in any directory and it works.
It sounds like it's arguably still a form of RAG, just where the retrieval is very different. I'm not saying that to knock your approach, just saying that it sounds like it's still the case where you're retrieving some context and then using that context to augment further generation. (I get that's definitely not what people think of when you say RAG though.)
Genuine question: at what point does the term RAG lose its meaning? Seems like LLMs work best when they have the right context, and that context must be pulled from somewhere for the LLM. But if that's RAG, then what isn't? Do you have a take on this? Been struggling to frame all this in my head, so would love some insight.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#96[dead]
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#97We already have AIDE, Continue, Cody , Aider, Cursor..
Why this?
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#98Your website has a serious issue. Trying to play the YouTube video makes the page slow down to a crawl, even in 1080p, while playing it on YouTube directly has no issue, even in 4K. On the project itself, I don't really find it exciting at all, I'm sorry. It's just another wrapper for a 3rd party model, and the fact that you can 1) describe the entire workflow in 3 paragraphs, and 2) built it and launched it in aroun…
Weird, thanks for flagging – we're just using a Youtube embed in an iframe but I'll take a look. No worries if this isn't a good fit for you. You're welcome to try it out for free anytime if you change your mind! FWIW I wasn't super excited when James first showed me the project. I had tried so many AI code editors before, but never found them to be _actually usable_. So when James asked me to try, I just thought I'd…
I would really rethink your value proposition.
> CLI allows for portability and system integration that plugins or extensions really can't do
In the past 6 or 7 years I haven't written a single line of code outside of a JetBrains IDE. Same thing for all of my team (whether they use JetBrains IDEs or VS Code), and I imagine for the vast majority of developers.
This is not a convincing argument for the vast majority of people. If anything, the fact that it requires a tool OUTSIDE of where they write code is an inconvenience.
> And when AI actually understands my codebase, I just get a lot more done.
But Amazon Q does this without me needing to type anything to instruct it, or to tell it which files to look at. And, again, without needing to go out of my IDE.
Having to switch to a new tool to write code using AI is a huge deterrent and asking for it is a reckless choice for any company offering those tools. Integrating AI in tools already used to write code is how you win over the market.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#99am I the only one who is scared of "it can run any command in your terminal"?
Hah no, you're not alone! Candidly, this is one of the top complaints from users. We're doing a lot of prompt engineering to be safe, but we can definitely do more. But the ones who take the leap of faith have found that it speeds up their workflows tremendously. Codebuff installs the right packages, sets up environments correctly, runs their scripts, etc. It feels magical because you can stay at a high level and focus on the real problems you're trying to solve.
If you're nervous about this, I'd suggest throwing Codebuff in a Docker container or even a separate instance with just your codebase.
Re: Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you
#100The demos I see for these types of tools are always some toy project and doesn't reflect day to day work I do at all. Do you have any example PRs on larger more complex projects that have been written with codebuff and how much of that was human interactive? The real problem I want someone to solve is helping me with the real niche/challenging portion of a PR, ex: new tiptap extension that can do notebook code eval,…
Absolutely! Imaging setting a bunch of css styles through a long winded AI conversation, when you could have an IDE to do it in a few seconds. I don't need that. The long tail of niche engineering problems is the time consuming bit now. That's not being solved at all, IMHO.
> ... setting a bunch of css styles through a long winded AI conversation
Any links on this topic you rate/could share?