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Comment by searchableguy | Hacker News Reader

I use Github Copilot Chat for the same which works with vscode directly. Any advantage over that?

I believe Github Copilot Chat only has access to the single currently viewed file, any other context/code from other files in the repo need to be copy/pasted in.

I have seen it do things that make me think it has access to a few of the other tabs of code that are also open.

That's not correct. It has context from anything that's open, and it knows about your overall project structure (for example, it knows if you have a pom.xml or a cargo.toml). That said, note that Microsoft has been deliberately vague about what does and doesn't get sent to Copilot, so I don't think there is an official answer to this.

I've just now exhaustively tested it with various combinations of open files. I've confirmed it can only read the currently "in focus" file, not the other which are open. Sometimes it seems like it can, based on the previous chat history / etc. Permutations like closing/reopening the files, toggling focus between them a few times, etc don't seem to make any difference. However, under very specific circumstances, it can sometimes read a single additional individual file if you specifically give it the file path -- but I've only gotten this to work with the primary readme, not other readme's scattered in other folders which it refuses to open/read/parse. Eventually it refuses to continue opening the readme in the project root -- so now I'm not 100% sure if it ever did, but I'm pretty sure it did.

Minimum procedure to replicate:

- open pom.xml and readme.md

- focus on readme.md

- prompt copilot chat: "summarize some of the readmes from this project"

- Receive something like "Here is a summary of the README excerpt you provided: The project is called $PROJECTNAME and is written in Java using Maven..."

- Clear the chat

- Change focus to pom.xml

- prompt copilot chat: "summarize some of the readmes from this project"

- I'm sorry, but based on the information you provided, I cannot access any README files from the project. Can you please provide me with the location of the README files so that I can help you summarize them?

- prompt copilot chat: "The location of the README file is in the project root"

- "Thank you for letting me know. Here is a summary of the README file located in the project root: The README file provides an overview of the project, called "$PROJECTNAME". The project is written in Java using Maven..."

- can you print a tree of the project files?

- "I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have access to the file system to print a tree of the project files. However, you can use the command line to print a tree of the project files."

- The location of the files is in the project root

- "You can use the command line to print a tree of the project files."

- can you tell me anything about my overall project structure?

- I'm sorry, but based on the information you provided, I don't have access to your project structure. However, I can provide some general information about a typical Java Maven project structure.

Copilot Chat is a different API than Copilot, so I don't think this is conclusive one way or the other, but I think this is a great writeup.

You can compare it yourself. Try asking CoPilot "code review all the files in this project and tell me what it does and how to improve it". If it does something at the same level of usefulness as ChatGPT, then its equivalent. If it struggles ... then ChatGPT has an advantage.

I personally don't have a CoPilot license. But I do pay the $20/mo for ChatGPT and found that the way it can reason about code, even about a whole project, is just mind blowing.

Isn't that still on waitlist-preview?

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