jahooma

Current AI's could never have such deep thoughts haha

I wrote every word! Though I did have some suggestions from Opus haha

Hi, just wrote up some reflections & strategy on this moment as a codegen startup founder.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Yup, it's just what we wanted for our coding agent. Codebuff can enter a "Deep thinking" mode and we can tell it to burn a lot of tokens hahaha.

I would try this if it had Android support! Is that planned?

Also curious which integrations people use the most. If it's email, why not just build an email app?

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.

I'm just saying what users of Codebuff have said about us compared to competitors.

You should try Codebuff and see for yourself how it reads files! It's not simply a tool call. We put a lot of work into it.

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!

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.