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Comment by ripped_britches | Hacker News Reader

This is a good anecdote but most software engineering is not scripting. It’s getting waist (or neck) deep in a large codebase and many intricacies.

That being said I’m very bullish on AI being able to handle more and more of this very soon. Cursor definitely does a great job giving us a taste of cross codebase understanding.

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Seconded. Zed makes it trivial to provide entire codebases as context to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. That particular model has felt as good as a junior developer when given small, focused tasks. A year ago, I wouldn’t have imagined that my current use of LLMs was even possible.

not sure about Claude but my main problem with 03-mini is that it 'forgets' the things which are supposed to fit in the context window. This results in it using different function names, data structures. I think it's guessing them instead of fetching from the previous records.

> This is a good anecdote but most software engineering is not scripting. It’s getting waist (or neck) deep in a large codebase and many intricacies.

The agent I'm working on (RA.Aid) handles this by crawling and researching the codebase before doing any work. I ended up making the first version precisely because I was working on a larger monorepo project with lots of files, backend, api layer, app, etc.

So I think the LLMs can do it, but only if techniques are used to allow it to hone in on the specific information in a codebase that is relevant to a particular change.

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