this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Programming
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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.