Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

How do you get Gemini to do a code review? Do you just paste the code into the web UI?

It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste.

When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini.

Then we go over it.

I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.

It seems most people aren’t worried about handing their code over to LLMs. Why is that? Isn’t there a concern that they will just train on your code? What if you’re trying to build a business, is there a fear that your idea or implementation will just get stolen or absorbed into the LLM and spit out into someone else’s code base? Or do people just not care anymore because code is so trivial to generate that it’s not worth very much?

Most llms have a privacy mode, including windsurf, that state they don’t use your input for training. But I think your last sentence is key, code is hardly ever so unique that it’s super valuable by itself. Ideas can be copied easily. For most software, it’s the whole package: really tackling the user problem, with the best user experience, with the right pricing, training, enablement, support, roadmap, community, network effect, etc.

Thanks that makes sense!

In my case, the code is public facing.

"concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file"

I think simonw has a tool that also does something like this? Edit- found it:

https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt

I have found Repomix[1] to be a good and straightforward tool for the task.

[1]: https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix

Nice this looks great too

I rolled my own, but it's exactly this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com