#File Edits

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

raw laurel
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TIL file edits are not a solved problem. There are entire startups just for that.

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We need at the very least a search/replace tool, and possibly diff apply - brute write-file() is expensive and unreliable.

But that's just one step.

solar echo
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Diff apply would be epic

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I'll implement it my workspace!

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I'll do search/replace just for completeness too

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Code workspaces probably need a full ast lookup? Maybe?

raw laurel
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What I've been told:

  • diff is the best you can do whith general model. it works but it's slower than a specialized model
  • I was also told "the top success for diff is 85% per aider benchmark"
  • cursor & others most likely use specialized models
  • startups like replace.ai offer proprietary models
static current
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yes, also related: https://aider.chat/docs/unified-diffs.html

I've seen that the avante.nvim maintainer implemented that to add similar "cursor planning mode like" to avante.

ref: https://x.com/yetone/status/1891878146779345248

aider
Unified diffs make GPT-4 Turbo 3X less lazy

GPT-4 Turbo has a problem with lazy coding, which can be signiciantly improved by asking for code changes formatted as unified diffs.

yetone (@yetone) on X

‌‌‌‌‌‌The most painful part of developing this feature was figuring out how to perform a streaming diff between the code being generated and the original code during the applying process. I looked into VSCode's Copilot, and it turns out that it waits until the code is completely

X ·
jade sequoia
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I'm running into a problem with my write_file() tool

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it looks like it messes up when writing < or > back to a file

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example:

162 : [2.2s] |          books = get_books(test_db)
162 : [2.2s] | -        assert len(books) >= 2
162 : [2.2s] | +        assert len(books) e 2
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and then in the next step when the test tool runs it dies with an invalid character type error

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also it doesn't happen every time, but when it does it is always with angle brackets

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short of removing that assertion from the test suite entirely, any ideas on how to fix it? it's knocking my agent off course whenever it happens

jade sequoia
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This was also happening with &

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fwiw I was able to dramatically reduce the occurrence of this error by keeping the file below 100 lines of code

solar echo
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Yeah that makes a huge difference. That's exactly why partial reads+writes are so effective for workspaces. We don't have to keep reading/writing entire files and adding that to the history

solar echo
raw laurel
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@solar echo dag/ is the new daggerverse/? 🙂

solar echo
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I'm trying to move from dagger-modules/ to dag/ because it's shorter and I still like monorepos for utility modules

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and it's just a bucket of dags 🙂

raw laurel
solar echo
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It's trying to use it and everything looks good, but I keep getting malformed patch errors 😞

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i'll try git apply instead of patch

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Same issue. I wonder if there's some bad characters hiding in there

raw laurel
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I wonder if there's an even "dumber" option that's just line-replace, or search-replace (I think @glass anvil showed me the official MCP file edit server by Anthropic uses search replace)