this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
36 points (97.4% liked)
Programming
17008 readers
329 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No but I think this is probably a great use case for AI. Haven't tried it though.
Nah, LLMs have severe context window limitations. It starts to get wackier after ~1000 LOC.
Gemini has a 1 million token limit. Also instead of just giving it the entire source you can give it a list of files and the ability to query them (e.g. to read an entire file, or search for usages/definitions of terms etc.).
In my experience, token limits mean nothing on larger context windows. 1 million tokens can easily be taken up by a very small amount of complex files. It also doesn’t do great traversing a tree to selectively find context which seems to be the most limiting factor I’ve run against trying to incorporate LLMs into complex and unknown (to me) projects. By the time I’ve sufficiently hunted down and provided the context, I’ve read enough of the codebase to answer most questions I was going to ask.
Right but presumably you can let the AI do that hunting.
Haven't tried Gemini; may work. But, in my experience with other LLMs, even if text doesn't exceed the token limit, LLMs start making more mistakes and sometimes behave strangely more often as the size of context grows.