Hacker News Reader

Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

This is going to sound a bit odd, but I suggest you detail what your tools do well and what they struggle with. For example I love Haxe, which is a niche programming language primarily for game development.

The vast majority of the time I try to use an llm with it, the code is essentially useless as it will try to invent methods that don't even exist.

For example if you're coding agents are really only good at JavaScript and a little bit of python, tell me that front and center.

View on HN

Good point! In that sense we're similar to most AI coding agents in that the languages we do well are the languages the mainstream LLMs do well. We might zoom in and add really good support for particular languages though (not decided yet), in which case we'll def mention that front and center!

Have you found any LLMs or coding agents that work well with Haxe? It might be a bit too niche for us (again, not sure yet), but I'd be very curious to see what they do well!

https://www.greptile.com/

This works well, however it literally will need to digest an entire repository. So for example if I feed it a repository for a haxe framework, it'll work much better than something like Chat GPT.

Thanks! That does look like a great tool.

In my unqualified opinion, LLMs would do better at niche languages or even specific versions of mainstream languages, as well as niche frameworks, if they were better at consultig the documentation for the language or framework, for example, the user could give the LLM a link to the docs or an offline copy, and the LLM would prioritise the docs over the pretrained code. Currently this is not feasible because 1. limited context is shared with the actual code, 2. RAG is one-way injection i to the LLM, the LLM usually wouldn't "ask for a specific docs page" even if they probably should.

100% agreed on both points. Point 1 relates to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43486526 as well. It's one of the biggest challenges, though maybe it'll automatically get better through models with bigger context windows (we can't assume that though)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com