2/12/2026 at 3:40:32 AM
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.
by mkw5053
2/13/2026 at 7:50:09 PM
Hey, are you planning to update docs for end users of your CLI? I was an Aider user who switched to Opencode but I want to experiment with token and time-efficient agents, and I'm assuming OpenHands is one.by aitchnyu
2/12/2026 at 4:06:57 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.
by jared_stewart
2/12/2026 at 5:11:56 AM
Aider actually prompts the model to say if it needs to see additional files. Whenever the model mentions file names, aider asks the user if they should be added to context.As well, any files or symbols mentioned by the model are noted. They influence the repomap ranking algorithm, so subsequent requests have even more relevant repository context.
This is designed as a sort of implicit search and ranking flow. The blog article doesn’t get into any of this detail, but much of this has been around and working well since 2023.
by anotherpaulg
2/12/2026 at 4:55:30 PM
I see, so the context adapts as the LLM interacts with the codebase across requests?That's a clever implicit flow for ranking.
The difference in my approach is that exploration is happening within a single task, autonomously. The agent traces through structure, symbols, implementations, callers in many sequential lookups without human interaction. New files are automatically picked up with filesystem watching, but the core value is that the LLM can navigate the code base the same way that I might.
by jared_stewart
2/13/2026 at 1:24:50 PM
> That's smart - but it is still…> That's a clever… The difference in my approach…
Are you using LLM to help you write these replies, or are you just picking up their stylistic phrasings the way expressions go viral at an office till everyone is saying them?
As an LLM, you wouldn't consider that you're replying confidently and dismissively while clearly having no personal experience with the CLI coding agent that not only started it all but for a year (eternity in this space) was so far ahead of upstarts (especially the VSCode forks family) it was like a secret weapon. And still is in many ways thanks to its long lead and being the carefully curated labor of a thoughtful mind.
As a dev seeking to improve on SOTA, having no awareness of the progenitor and the techniques one most do better than, seems like a blind spot worth digging into before dismissing. Aider's benchmarks on practical applicability of model advancements vs. regressions in code editing observably drove both OpenAI and Anthropic to pay closer attention and improve SOTA for everyone.
Aider was onto something, and you are onto something, pushing forward the 'semantic' understanding. It's worth absorbing everything Paul documented and blogged, and spending some time in Aider to enrich a feel of what Claude Code chose to do the same or differently, which ideas may be better, and what could be done next to go further.
by Terretta
2/12/2026 at 1:25:36 PM
Aider's repomap is a great idea. I remember participating in the discussion back then.The unfortunate thing for Python that the repomap mentions, and untyped/duck-typed languages, is that function signatures do not mean a lot.
When it comes to Rust, it's a totally different story, function and method signatures convey a lot of important information. As a general rule, in every LLM query I include maximum one function/method implementation and everything else is function/method signatures.
By not giving mindlessly LLMs whole files and implementations, I have never used more than 200.000 tokens/day, counting input and output. This counts as 30 queries for a whole day of programming, and costs less than a dollar per day not matter which model I use.
Anyway, putting the agent to build the repomap doesn't sound such a great idea. Agents are horribly inefficient. It is better to build the repomap deterministically using something like ast-grep, and then let the agent read the resulting repomap.
by emporas
2/12/2026 at 5:02:12 PM
Typed languages definitely provide richer signal in there signatures - and my experience has been that I get more reliable generations from those languages.On the efficiency point, the agent isn't doing any expensive exploration here. There is a standalone server which builds and maintains the index, the agent is only querying it. So it's closer to the deterministic approach implemented in aider (at least in a conceptual sense) with the added benefit that the LLM can execute targeted queries in a recursive manner.
by jared_stewart
2/12/2026 at 12:46:23 PM
I am planning to add similar concepts to Yek. Either tree-sitter or ast-grep. Your work here and Aider's work would be my guiding prior art. Thank you for sharing!by mohsen1
2/12/2026 at 3:42:36 AM
I just looked and it was posted a number of times with 0 discussionhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38062493
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41411187
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40231527
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39993459
by mkw5053