Comment by ninkendo

Well the point is to avoid them needing to swallow it in a single gulp… after all, the source code is already all the information you need to get all this metadata.

The use cases I have in mind are for codebases with many millions of lines of code, where just dumping it all into the context is unreasonably expensive. In these scenarios, it’d be beneficial to give the LLM a sort of SQL-like language it can use to prod at the code base in small chunks.

In fact I keep thinking of SQL as an example in my head, but maybe it’s best to take it literally: why don’t we have a SQL for source code? Why can’t I do “select function.name from functions where parameters contains …” or similar (with clever subselects, joins, etc) to get back whatever exists in the code?

It’s something I always wanted in general, not just for LLM’s. But LLM’s could make excellent use of it if there’s simply not enough context size to reasonably slurp up all the code.