BestPromptFinder

Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you

The prompt

Hey HN! We’re James and Brandon building Codebuff ( Codebuff is like Cursor Composer, but in your terminal: it modifies files based on your natural language requests. You can try it with `npm i -g codebuff` and start using it immediately for free. We have no login gate, and we give all accounts up to $20 worth of credits. Codebuff is different because we simplified the input to one step: you type what you want done in your terminal and hit enter. Then Codebuff looks through your whole codebase and makes the edits it wants, to existing source files or new ones. It also can run your tests, the type checker, or install packages to fulfill your request. Demo video: It all started at a hackathon. I was trying out Sonnet 3.5 which had recently come out and seeing if I could use it to write code. The script I cobbled together that day pulled codebase context in one step and used it to rewrite files with changes in the second step. This two step process still exists today. Incidentally, my hackathon script worked rather poorly and my demo failed to produce any useful code. But that weekend I thought about the kind of errors it made, and realized that with more context on our codebase, it might have been able to get the change right. For example, it tried to create an endpoint on our server (at my previous startup), but it didn't know that you needed to edit 3 specific files to do this (yeah... our backend was not that clean). So I hand-wrote a guide to our codebase, like I was instructing a new hire. I put it in a markdown file and passed it into Sonnet 3.5's system prompt. And the crazy thing is that it started producing wayyy better code. So, I started getting excited. In fact, this code guide idea still exists in Codebuff today as knowledge.md files which are automatically read on every request. I didn't think of this project as a startup idea at first. I thought it was just a simple script anyone could w

Why this prompt

• 89% found it useful across General

Source

Hacker News

Related Coding prompts