brandonchen

14 ms·

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by brandonchen 2y ago
Proud to have helped edit an earlier draft of this — go Dexter go!
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Show HN: Twitch plays Codebuff – a natural language coding experiment(twitch.tv)
11 points by brandonchen 2y ago|0 comments
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Thanks! Yup, so long as you don't have key bindings for meta-x and meta-c, you ought to be good in the terminal. We honor any repository's .gitignore and won't touch those files. We don't even let Codebuff know they exis
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by brandonchen 2y ago
It seems like we're all in our own tech bubbles more and more. Distribution is clearly a tough problem to crack, and no one in this space has really mastered it yet, aside from arguably Github Copilot. No comment on YC here, but I thin
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Thanks! That's awesome to hear – if you wouldn't mind me asking, what was the context and tech stack of your side project? We love hearing about the wide variety of use cases people have found for Codebuff!
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by brandonchen 2y ago
I assume you're referring to it guessing at what command you might type next? If so, the closest I can think of is Warp. Have you tried it?
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Good question – here are a few reasons: - It chooses files to read automatically on each message — unlike Cursor’s composer feature. It also reads a lot more than Cursor's @codebase command. - It takes 0 clicks — Codebuff just edits yo
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by brandonchen 2y ago
brace yourself. the night critics are coming.
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Will do Also forwarding to our competitors, but something tells me they will ignore this.
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by brandonchen 2y ago
> The sexy demos don't, in my opinion and experience, win over the engineers and leaders you need. Great point, we're in talks with a company and this exact issue came up. An engineer used Codebuff over a weekend to build a dem
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Tongue-in-cheek! No idea what you're talking about. But I appreciate the kind words :) Ultimately, I think a future where the limit to good software is good ideas and agency to realize them, as opposed to engineering black boxes, mucki
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Beyond what James highlighted, I personally really like how simple Codebuff is. CLI tools tend to go a bit overboard with options and configurations imo, which is ok if you're just setting them up once or twice. But for a tool I want t
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Thanks for sharing – I definitely want to plays with Aider more. My knowledge of it is limited, but IIRC Aider doesn't pull in the right files to create context for itself like Codebuff does when making updates to your codebase. Anothe
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Heh, this is an underrated comment. Fundamentally, I think codegen a pretty new space and lots of people are jumping in because they see the promise. Remains to be seen what the consolidation looks like. With the rate of advancement in LLMs
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by brandonchen 2y ago
I'm sure your prompting is great! It's just hard because LLMs tend to be very wordy by default. This was something we struggled with for a while, but I think we've done a good job at making Codebuff take a more minimal approa
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Great idea! We were kicking around something like this, but couldn't get it ready in time for today's launch – but keep your eyes peeled! Our Discord community is a great place to stay up to date. Yup, I had the same thought. I ju
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Ah, good catch. We (read: I) introduced a bug that gave customers $500 worth of credits in a month as opposed to the $100 they paid for, and this user saw that and took advantage. Needless to say, we fixed the issue and added more copy to s
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Amazing, glad it worked well for you! I main VSCode but tried Zed in my demo video and loved the smoothness of it. Totally understand where you're coming from, I personally use it in a terminal tab (amongst many) in any IDE I'm us
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Nice, super simple. We're definitely fitting into this definition of RAG then!
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Gotcha – so broadly encompasses how we give external context to the LLM. Appreciate the extra note about vector databases, that's where I've heard this term used most, but I'm glad to know it extends beyond that. Thanks for e
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Thanks for being an early user and supporter! You've helped us catch so many issues that have helped us get the product to where it is today!
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by brandonchen 2y ago
FWIW I don't find that I'm losing good engineering habits/thought processes. Codebuff is not at the stage where I'm comfortable accepting its work without reviewing, so I catch bugs it introduces or edge cases it's
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by brandonchen 2y ago
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 speed
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by brandonchen 2y ago
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
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by brandonchen 2y ago
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.
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Cruft that built up over time But you make a good point, I'll write a ticket to remove it soon.
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by brandonchen 2y ago
To add on, I know a lot of people see the terminal as cruft/legacy from the mainframe days. But it is a funny thing to look at tons of people's IDE setup and see that the one _consistent_ thing between them all is that they have a
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by brandonchen 2y ago
A skilled surgeon is a great analogy! We actually instruct Codebuff to focus on making the most minimal edits, so that it does precisely what you want.
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by brandonchen 2y ago
Sorry Will try an external keyboard next time!
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by brandonchen 2y ago
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

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