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by ericmcer 584 days ago
I have tried a few AI coding tools and always found them impressive but I don't really need something to autocomplete obvious code cases.

Is there an AI tool that can ingest a codebase and locate code based on abstract questions? Like: "I need to invalidate customers who haven't logged in for a month" and it can locate things like relevant DB tables, controllers, services, etc.

3 comments

Cursor (Claude behind the scenes) can do that, however as always, your mileage may vary.

I tried building a whole codebase inspector, essentially what you are referring to with Gemini's 2 million token context window but had troubles with their API when the payload got large. Just 500 error with no additional info so...

I've played around with Claude and larger docs and it's honestly been a bit of a crapshoot, it feels like only some of the information gets into the prompt as the doc gets larger. They're great for converting PDF tables to more usable formats though.
It's ugly, but I've had some success with uploading a few files from a project and a sketch of the schema. Then asking for new functionality.

ChatGPT and Claude seem to be pretty good at maintaining an implicit understanding of the codebase based on a subset of files.

I haven’t seen quite that, but it’s an interesting question; like a semantic search.