Hacker News Reader

You should check out ChatDBG project - which AFAICT goes much further than this work, though in a different direction, and which, among other things, lets the LLM drive the debugging process - has been out since early 2023. We initially did a WinDBG integration but have since focused on lldb/gdb and pdb (the Python debugger), especially for Python notebooks. In particular, for native code, it integrates a language server to let the LLM easily find declarations and references to variables, for example. We spent considerable time developing an API that enabled the LLM to make the best use of the debugger’s capabilities. (It also is not limited to post mortem debugging). ChatDBG’s been out since 2023, though it has of course evolved since that time. Code is here [1] with some videos; it’s been downloaded north of 80K times to date. Our technical paper [2] will be presented at FSE (top software engineering conference) in June. Our evaluation shows that ChatDBG is on its own able to resolve many issues, and that with some slight nudging from humans, it is even more effective.

[1] https://github.com/plasma-umass/ChatDBG (north of 75K downloads to date) [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16354

View on HN

The second command, `definition`, prints the location and source code for the definition corresponding to the first occurrence of a symbol on a given line of code. For example, `definition polymorph.c:118` target prints the location and source for the declaration of target corresponding to its use on that line. The definition implementation leverages the `clangd` language server, which supports source code queries via JSON-RPC and Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol.