Comment by rapind
8 days ago
Somewhat related. I built an Elm app all in one file as an experiment and to see if I like it. It's a little over 7k lines and I'm occasionally adding more to it.
It's actually pretty straightforward if you're in a language with lexical scoping, and it simplifies some things, like includes / cyclical, no modules, no hunting through files, etc.
I feel like this set up could integrate really well w/ AI models.
I've found that the only real limitation, at least in my experiment, was a lack of decent editor support. I use vim so this wasn't really much of an issue for me with many great ways to navigate a file, and a combination of vertical and horizontal splits on a large screen, but when I opened it up in other "modern" editors the ergonomics fell apart quite a bit.
I think the biggest downside was re-using variable names between large scopes occasionally made it hard to find the reference I wanted (E.g. i, x, key, val), but again, better editor support allowing you to limit your search to within the current scope would help. Also easily mitigated with more verbose throwaway variable naming.
I write Elm and use Emacs primarily, and sometimes neovim. Are you using lsp in vim? You’re doing it right by staying in one file until it hurts, that’s the recommendation for Elm, but I can’t recall if I’ve had issues using go-to-def or other lsp functions like your describing
No LSP. It honestly doesn’t speed me up any. I already have the standard library memorized, plus some of the common community lib methods (List.Extra) and my typing speed is faster than I can think anyways.
I’m thinking the same approach would also work well in F#, Haskell, OCaml.
> no hunting through files, etc.
It’s easy to switch to files by name with a few keystrokes. Files are names to group things I’m looking for.
I would much rather do that than try to search through a 7,000 line file for what I need.
> I feel like this set up could integrate really well w/ AI models.
Massive files or too many files break AI models. Grouping functionality into smaller files and including only relevant files is key. The file and folder names can be hints about where to find the right files to include.
> I would much rather do that than try to search through a 7,000 line file for what I need.
I mean I'm not arguing for it as a best practice. I did it as an experiment (as I stated), and discovered it's actually really easy, and snappy for me to navigate in Vim. Mileage may vary with other editors. Have you tried it?
> Massive files or too many files break AI models
It's growing faster than I code! With the latest Gemeni at least it's much larger at 1-2 mil tokens. I'm sure we'll hit a ceiling though, but I also think we may find some context caching / rag type optimizations eventually.
The big problem with that is you’ll eventually blow your context window feeding the model with stuff that it mostly doesn’t need in order to complete its task.
I can’t think of anything I’d want to add to the context for Elm at least, assuming the standard libraries are already in the model (or can be added via RAG). Gemeni is 2m tokens now and I expect this will grow at least until it’s no longer meaningful.