Ask HN: AI tool for getting oneself across a new repo?

2 pointsposted 10 months ago
by nomilk

Item id: 41629478

6 Comments

dtagames

10 months ago

I would say the short answer is, "No." What you can do, however, is open the repo in VS Code, then ask Copilot about specific sections you highlight. You can ask for an explanation or guidance on how to extend or modify the code.

While "grok the whole codebase" demos are out there, I don't think anyone is there yet in practice. The next contender is likely to be Copilot Workspace, currently in invite beta.

nomilk

10 months ago

Does CoPilot definitely see the whole repo? I thought it saw just the current file (or part of the current file the user has selected)?

dtagames

10 months ago

Definitely. And the more you use it with a specific repo, the better it gets. You'll find it can help with auto completion and function calls even in modules several files away.

vunderba

10 months ago

The Continue extension (Jetbrains, VS Code) can do this to a degree. It spends a bit of time upfront creating an embeddings index of all the files in the repo and from there you can ask questions about the code base.

https://github.com/continuedev/continue

I prefer it to other programs (Cursor, Copilot, etc) because it supports BYOK (Bring your own key) and is pretty granular in terms of letting you assign an embedding provider, assistant model, autocompletion model, etc.

geenkeuse

10 months ago

Not sure if this is in the direction that you're going but try storia.ai