A lot of power users use it to organize their digital life in one place (to-dos, reminders, schedules) and then they use the social integrations (slack, email, sms) to move the information around.
Nice! It's a totally different world with AI tools. Seems like a good strategy to get previously non-technical folks in on it, especially for front end apps.
Yes, but did you try it? I think Codebuff is by far the easiest to use and may also be more effective in your large codebase than any other comparable tool (i.e. like Cursor composer, Aider, Cline. Not sure about Qodo) because it is better at finding the appropriate files.
Re: style guide. We encourage you to write up `knowledge.md` files which are included in every prompt. You can specify styles or other guidelines to follow in your codebase. One motivating example is we wrote in instructions of how to add an endpoint (edit these three files), and that made it do the right thing when asked to create an endpoint.
Sure! I git cloned some open source projects, and wrote a script (with Codebuff) to pick commits and individual diffs of files. For each of those, I had Claude write a sketch of what changed from the old file to the new.
This is all the data I need: the old file, the sketch of how Claude would update it, and the ground truth diff that should be produced. I compiled this into the ideal conversation where the assistant responds with the perfect patch, and that became the training set. I think I had on the order of ~300 of these conversations for the first run, and it worked pretty well.
I came up with more improvements too, like replacing all the variant placeholder comments like "// ... existing code ..." or "# ... (keep the rest of the function)" with one [[*REPLACE_WITH_EXISITNG_CODE*]] symbol, and that made it more accurate
Thanks for your reply! I started Codebuff without being aware of Aider. I actually have not yet tried Aider (though I plan to try it soon!).
It's totally true that a lot of the development of Codebuff is merely me (and Brandon) working through a lot of the problems that Aider already solved! That makes sense.
Partly, my thesis is that if you start after Sonnet 3.5 is out, that you design things differently. For example, I started without manual file selection and worked to make it more like an agent that has native access to your environment.
Needless to say, I'm a fan of the work Paul has done on Aider, and I've appreciated the benchmarks and guides he's created and shared publicly. And Cline is also an amazing project which I want to try out soon as well!
With respect to privacy, we have pledged not to store your codebase, and mainly store logs that we use to debug the application. When seeing users use Codebuff, I mean I literally watched them use it, as we've done many in-person user tests, plus the Manifold Team has been using Codebuff for a while.
We also intend to release a Privacy Mode, like Cursor has, where we will not store anything at all, not even the logs of your interactions!
It makes sense to be a bit skeptical of Codebuff, since we are so new, but I intend to not let our users down!
Being in the same product space for more than 3 months, I wonder how one can not come across 2 popular open source tools that do more or less the same thing.
Like Aider has 21k stars, and Cline has around 11k stars. Both these product names come up on HN, Reddit frequently.
Curious to know if YC does some research on existing products before backing a new business.
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 think it's easy to criticize from the outside. I've personally have been impressed by all the peers, group partners, and alumni I've met so far. I'm biased, but I think YC knows what it's doing. Also, YC backs founders, not ideas.
In any YC application, they request a list of competitors and why your product is better! Curious about what OP listed as competitors in the application.
I've also built a similar free and open-source tool gptme (2.5k stars), since the start of last year (GPT-3.5). It has been impossible to ignore the great work done by Aider.
Yup. I recall that at some point maybe a year ago, pretty much every other LLM thread that had people speculating whether some LLM could do X or Y / improved or worsened for Z / etc., would have Paul show up and comment something along the lines, "Actually, I've benchmarked this thoroughly in my work on Aider; here's <link to data and analysis>" or such. Those were usually some of the most insightful comments in the whole thread.
I found those comments, and the work they linked to, especially valuable because it's rare to see advanced work on LLM applications done and talked about in the open. Everyone else doing equivalent work seems to want to make a startup out of it, so all we usually get is weekend hacks that stall out quickly.
Sweet. Personally, I use both Cursor and Codebuff.
I open the terminal panel at the bottom of the Cursor window, start up `codebuff`, and voila, I have an upgraded version of Cursor Compose!
Depending on what exactly I'm implementing I rely more on codebuff or do more manual coding in Cursor. For manual coding, I mostly just use the tab autocomplete. That's their best feature IMO.
But codebuff is very useful for starting features out if I brain dump what I want and then go fix it up. Or, writing tests or scripts. Or refactoring. Or integrating a new api.
As codebuff has gotten better, I've found it useful in more cases. If I'm implementing a lot of web UI, I can nearly stop looking at the code altogether and just keep prompting it until it works.
Hopefully that gives you some idea of how you could use codebuff in your day-to-day development.
Codebuff is a bit simpler and requires less input from the user since you just chat and it does multi-file edits/runs commands. It's also more powerful since it pulls more files as context.
I think you just need to try it to see the difference. You can feel how much easier it is haha.
We don't store your codebase, and have a similar policy to Cursor, in that our server is mostly a thin wrapper that forwards requests to LLM providers.
The PearAI debacle is another story, but mostly they copied the open source project Continue.dev without giving proper attribution.
