alt Hacker NewsForgive my naive understanding of LLMs - but how do you get semantic understanding of a codebase, such that it knows what changes to make/why/where, without a wider understanding of language more broadly?
I'm using the word understanding loosely there, but I couldn't think of another word.
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Depends on what exactly you want to change. Lsp can do a lot but only in very simple changes.
Intellij when I used to use it had a lot great features like refactoring, extracting part of code as a function, renaming and creating empty classes/boilerplate but that's it
In current job I can order LLM to take data sink from other endpoint and write new with given URL. It will fetch from endpoint, check what it gives, compare with other and write new sink. Then it needs polishing because it always create something as awful as possible with cloning data all around but the most boring and soul sucking part is done
It's a totally fair question. I'm personally wondering if there's a half way point. Some kind of structured language that isn't plain English that a "dumb" LLM is able to parse. It could be human written, or it could be written by a "smart" LLM at a greater cost.
LLMs at my work have access to Slack chat history, the Wiki, the complete git history, (AI generated) notes from every in person meeting team meeting, JIRA, all code reviews, and all production logs, as well as your personal email (when you run it yourself)
They can typically explain the history of something faster than any human