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mkw5053 • today at 3:40 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

Aider [0] wrote a piece about this [1] way back in Oct 2023!

I stumbled upon it in late 2023 when investigating ways to give OpenHands [2] better context dynamically.

[0] https://aider.chat/

[1] https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html

[2] https://openhands.dev/

Replies

jared_stewart • today at 4:06 AM

Aider's repo-map concept is great! thanks for sharing, I'd not been aware of it. Using tree-sitter to give the LLM structural awareness is the right foundation IMO. The key difference is how that information gets to the model.

Aider builds a static map, with some importance ranking, and then stuffs the most relevant part into the context window upfront. That's smart - but it is still the model receiving a fixed snapshot before it starts working.

What the RLM paper crystallized for me is that the agent could query the structure interactively as it works. A live index exposed through an API lets the agent decide what to look at, how deep to go, and when it has enough. When I watch it work it's not one or two lookups but many, each informed by what the previous revealed. The recursive exploration pattern is the core difference.

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