[andai]

Nice, this sounds great. I want to mention a related issue here, which is that on small codebases, Claude spends a lot of time looking for stuff when it could have just dumped the whole codebase into the context in one go and used very little tokens.

I found a nice workaround which is that you can just dump the whole directory into context, as a startup hook. So then Claude skips the "fumble around blindly in the dark" portion of every task. (I've also seen a great project that worked on bigger repos where it'll give the model an outline with stubs, though I forget what it was called.)

[mackenney]

Maybe aider? https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html

[andai]

I actually made a custom harness based on Aider's edit format (the find/replace thing). (I think most AI stuff ended up using a very similar format.)

It just does what I need and no more: load code into context, append my question or instruction, call LLM, apply patches. Repeat.

I haven't used Aider itself though, maybe it does that too.

My harness was nice relative to Claude Code and Codex because, it doesn't need to poke around the filesystem (cause I have small repos and dump the whole thing), and it makes all edits simultaneously (doesn't need to edit one file at a time).

It reads all files and edits all necessary files in a single round trip.

The really nice thing is that when you're making many small fine grained changes like that, you can use a much smaller, faster, cheaper model.

And if it's fast enough, it actually becomes a real-time activity. It's not "prompt, wait..." but "prompt, immediately get the result." It's interactive. You stay active and engaged. It's great.

[Imanari]

Good old aider ahead of its time

[stephantul]

This is true, agents just don't know a lot about the things they're looking at, e.g., the number of files, file sizes, etc.

Although for small codebases it also holds that whatever you would like to find it easy to find, so search still might help you with cost