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hunterbrooks

88 karma · joined November 5, 2022

Astronomer -> ML engineer -> Founder

Currently: ellipsis.dev (W24), Managed Cloud Agents

hunter@ellipsis.dev

submissionscomments
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
No way, anyone can make silly mistakes. Ellipsis is a 2nd pair of eyes to catch stuff like that
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
The product works on draft PR's too, but not on local.

Sometimes reviewers rope in Ellipsis by asking questions (we also support natural language Q&A about a PR) or by having a design discussion via GH comments and then assigning the change to Ellipsis

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
As it stands today, Ellipsis isn't sold as an AI software engineer.

One of our largest learnings is that state of the art LLM's aren't good enough to write code autonomously, but they are good enough to be helpful during code review.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Automated code reviews are a step in the software development lifecycle, not a replacement for human reviewers.

Ellipsis can't commit code without your permission and approval, so this particular parrot can't feather your filesystem.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
All those tools do code review, so you'll have to try them out for yourself to see which is the most helpful.

But when it comes to writing code for you, not all those tools actually run your unit tests/linter/compile/etc. Ellipsis will, and it'll use the stdout/stderr to fix it's own mistakes, meaning the commit delivered to you actually compiles/passes CI.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Hmm, that searches issues, which isn't the best way to see Ellipsis' work.

Example of PR review: https://github.com/getzep/zep-js/pull/67#discussion_r1594781...

Example of issue-to-PR: https://github.com/getzep/zep/issues/316

Example of bug fix on a PR: https://github.com/jxnl/instructor/pull/546#discussion_r1544...

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Ellipsis increases the quality of code a developer brings to their teammates, meaning fewer PR comments, meaning the team ships faster. It's not a replacement for human review. It's most often used by the PR author after a self review but before asking for reviews from human teammates.

Ellipsis will use your existing lint/test commands when making code changes. For example, you can leave a comment on a PR that says "@ellipsis-dev fix the assertion in the failing unit test" and Ellipsis will run the tests, observe the failure, make the code change, confirm the tests pass, lint-fix the code, and push a commit or new PR

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Hmm... probably, send me an email.
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Nearly all languages are supported, but some perform better than others.

JS/TS, Python, Java, C++, Ruby are highly supported.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
It's most helpful when a GitHub/Linear issue is linked because the "why" is extracted, and also for larger PR's
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
We offer Ellipsis to large open source projects for free. Email us team@ellipsis.dev

I was referencing the recent xz backdoor hack.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Totally fair - there's a saturation right now of magic AI dev tools. We try to differentiate by not over promising/under delivering and by solving a problem that's closely matched to what today's state of the art LLM's can handle: code review.

But the only really way to figure out if it's useful for your team is to try it. That's why we added a free trial.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Yeah, I use it for lots of boilerplate work like adding new API endpoints, new Celery jobs, and building react components.
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Definitely agree with this.

One analogy I see today is the typical testing pipeline. Unit tests get run locally, then maybe a CI job runs unit tests + integration tests, then maybe there's a deployment job which does a blue/green release. At every stage the system is being "tested", but because the tests validate different capabilities, it's like concentric circles that grow confidence for the change.

A software dev lifecycle that uses AI dev tools is similar. Agents will review/contribute at the various stages of the SDLC, sometimes with overlap, but mostly additive and building on the output of one another.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
No, but maybe if your widely adopted, poorly supported open source project uses Ellipsis for code reviews we may be able to catch that type of hack ;)
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Ellipsis uses BUNCH of LLM agents internally. If you built your own code generation LLM agent you'd need to also build a way to execute the code that the agent writes, which is a bit of an engineering headache.

We handle this, the result is that if you set up a Dockerfile, we promise to return working, tested code: https://docs.ellipsis.dev/code#from-a-pr

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Ellipsis – Automated PR reviews and bug fixes
Teams should use both Copilot (synchronous code generation) and Ellipsis (async code gen).

Sure, Copilot speeds up human dev productivity, but our take is that humans should only be spending their time on the highest value code changes and use products like Ellipsis to handle the rest.

The downside of async code gen is that Ellipsis workflows take a few minutes to run because Ellipsis is actually building the project, running the tests, fixing it's mistakes, etc. The upside is that a developer can have multiple workflows running at once, and each workflow delivers higher quality code because it's guaranteed to be working + tested.

I'm super bullish on async code gen. I think there's a whole category of tedious development tasks with unambiguous solutions that can be automated to the point where a human just needs to give it a LGTM.

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Devie – Describe and launch a web app in seconds
> Does Devie auto-fix compilation errors?

Awesome to see you have this on your roadmap. Our product has similar functionality and it's quite a pain to get right. Excited to see how this shapes up

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: I created a nicer-looking alternative to Excel's charts
Cool! And so very overdue
hunterbrooks··on Show HN: This website is hosted on DNS
Pretty cool, even if it's a bit of a toy.

I'm no networking expert, but "without the need for web servers" isn't really correct because the DNS is a type of server, right?

hunterbrooks··on Show HN: Namique, straight-to-point brand name generator
I assume you also check NameCheap when a query is submitted - how did you get it to run so fast? Are you using 3.5 on the backend?

What's the NameCheap API access like? Expensive?

hunterbrooks··on Engineers Need to Write
Totally agree - Because I believe in this, I’m spending my time building a GitHub bot that raises Pull Requests from descriptive GitHub issues: https://twitter.com/mrhunterbrooks/status/163937365101010944...

Clearly written technical specs make implementation easy but also easy to reason about.

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