Comment by andai

>Code retains its function signatures

Nice. In original GPT-4 days (April 2023), I made a simple coding agent that worked with GPT-4's 8K (!) context window. The original version used some kind of AST walker, but then I realized I can get basically identical result (for Python) with `grep def` and `grep class`...

Took a look at your repo though, I am impressed you put a lot of thought into this.

It's interesting that Anthropic doesn't seem to be incentivized to do anything like this. Their approach seems to be "spawn a bunch of Haikus to grep around whole codebase until one of them finds something". You'd think a few lines of code could give you an overview of the codebase before you go blindly poking around. But maybe they're optimized for massive codebases where even the skeletons end up eating huge amounts of context.

The subagents "solve" context pollution by dying. If they find something, they only tell you the parent agent where it is. If not, they tell nothing. I guess that works but it feels heavy-handed somehow.

In CC I added a startup hook that similar to yours, dumps the skeleton of current dir, files, function names etc. into context, and the "time spent poking around" drops to zero.