Comment by the_duke
3 days ago
I've had great success with a tool I wrote that can print sparse ASTs for code.
https://github.com/theduke/smartedit
With the skill installed GPT 5.6 usually automatically uses it, and it reduces code exploration time and token usage significantly, for example by just printing the types and functions in a file without bodies, and only expanding when needed.
(note: it also has editing functionality, which doesn't work so well, since the models are heavily tilted towards common editing tools in post training)
Interesting tool, it seems that dedicated skills for these tools are important. Even explicit system-prompt instructions—such as “you must use tool X for code exploration”—often fail to behave as expected.
Another tricky part is that how to evaluate customized toolsets properly and ensure they continue to work perfectly as the underlying model/harness evolves.
Very good tool: I see the go support is not released. Will you be cutting a new release? Will take it for a spin. IMO you can specialize this as a read only AST/search tool, as you said, let models use regular edit tool.
Also some sample commands runs and output, would be useful in the README, for anyone passing by.
Yeah, I'll do a new release with a whole bunch of local fixes later today.
This look interesting. I have a large mono repo at working ill got it a go.