[HN Gopher] Show HN: Bloop - Answer questions about your code wi...
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Show HN: Bloop - Answer questions about your code with an LLM agent
Hi HN! We launched bloop 10 weeks ago
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236275) and received a huge
amount of feedback (both positive + constructive). We've undertaken
a rewrite of the core search framework, which now acts as an LLM
agent, significantly improving the number of queries that can be
successfully answered. There's a bunch of hype surrounding LLM
agents, but we're positive this is one of the first implementations
of an agent that can deliver immediate value for engineers working
on existing projects, especially larger ones. We'll do a full write
up of how the agent works and the tools it can use soon, but we
wanted to share our progress, now that we've got a stable release.
bloop is a developer assistant that uses GPT-4 to answer questions
about your codebase. The agent searches both your local and remote
repositories with natural language, regex and filtered queries.
Some of the ways engineers use bloop to improve their efficiency
when working on large codebases: - Summarise how large files work
and how multiple files work together - Understand how to use open
source libraries when documentation is lacking - Identify the
origin of errors - Ask questions about English-language codebases
in other languages - Reduce code duplication by checking for
existing functionality - Write new code, taking into account
existing codebase context (eg: "write a dockerfile for this
project") bloop runs as a free desktop app on Mac, Windows and
Linux: https://github.com/bloopAI/bloop/releases/latest. On
desktop, your code is indexed with a MiniLM embedding model and
stored locally, meaning at index time your codebase stays private.
'Private' here means that no code is shared with us or OpenAI at
index time, and when a search is made only relevant code snippets
are shared to generate the response. (This is more or less the same
data usage as Copilot). We also have a paid cloud offering for
teams ($45 per user per month). Members of the same organisation
can search a shared index hosted by us and will get access to
enterprise only features down the line (currently there's no
feature gap between desktop and cloud).
Author : louiskw
Score : 50 points
Date : 2023-06-09 17:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| nickthesick wrote:
| This looks really interesting, I wonder if we can get to the
| point of having this all be local to your machine. The idea to
| use embeddings to search for relevant code snippets is maybe
| obvious to some, but just now getting into this stuff, just blew
| my mind!
|
| I find that the hardest problems to find are interfaces between
| projects like a bad frontend call into a backend or backend to
| backend. I wonder if this could index separate projects & draw
| links between them
| louiskw wrote:
| Semantic relationships between backend/frontend or
| microservices are super interesting.
|
| We're not far off, for example you if you index bloop itself
| with bloop and ask "What message does the backend send to
| indicate the frontend should close the eventsource?" bloop will
| return a decent answer which takes into account the relevant
| frontend and backend code.
|
| This is an active area of improvement.
| robinduckett wrote:
| Can we use our own GPT4 api access ?
| louiskw wrote:
| Soon, we're working on open sourcing our GPT proxy. As it's not
| possible to self serve sign up to a GPT4 API key we haven't
| prioritised
| robinduckett wrote:
| Cool. I downloaded and tried out the app but it just says
| "Loading code line ranges" on all the returned results.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| > ... uses GPT4
|
| when will people learn not to send their entire IP to Microsoft?
| louiskw wrote:
| We use OpenAI directly, not Azure
| replwoacause wrote:
| But isn't OpenAI funded by Microsoft in the form of Azure
| compute?
| louiskw wrote:
| That's not how funding works, Microsoft can't read your
| data.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Yeah ok, I was just pointing out that the data is
| ultimately being sent to Microsoft owned infra.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Does Bloop play in the same space as GitHub Copilot Chat?
| https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/artificial-intelli...
| louiskw wrote:
| I haven't tried Copilot Chat but I imagine the key difference
| is the context. bloop's tuned to answer questions from anywhere
| in a repo, copilot chat uses the context of what you're looking
| at in-IDE.
| jordn wrote:
| What have been some of your learnings for getting agents to work?
| louiskw wrote:
| Generate as few tokens as possible, GPT4 is running a few times
| to generate a single answer and latency quickly becomes the
| biggest UX issue.
|
| We abandoned most of the common thinking around chain of
| thought reasoning, finding it didn't help accuracy much whilst
| increasing response times significantly.
|
| Full write up to follow in next week or so.
| huydotnet wrote:
| Great product! I gave it a try and was really impressed!
|
| One thing: Could your team have an explanation somewhere on the
| home page to help the users understand how their private code is
| being handled (locally and when the chat request happen)?
|
| The only place I could find that information is on the HN launch
| thread, would be nice if it's available in the home page!
| louiskw wrote:
| Yes, have been meaning to do this! We've been super focussed on
| the app itself often at the expense of the marketing site.
|
| Glad to hear you found it helpful, I'm around if you have any
| issues.
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(page generated 2023-06-10 23:00 UTC)