My experience with Copilot (which is admittedly a few months outdated; I never tried Cursor but will soon) shows that it’s really good at inline completion and producing boilerplate for me but pretty bad at understanding or even recognizing the existence of scaffolding and business logic already present in my projects.
> but I mostly just paste exactly what I want the model to know into a prompt.
Does this include the work you do on your larger projects? Do those larger projects fit entirely within the context window? If not, without RAG, how do you effectively prompt a model to recognize or know about the relevant context of larger projects?
For example, say I have a class file that includes dozens of imports from other parts of the project. If I ask the model to add a method that should rely upon other components of the project, how does the model know what’s important without RAG? Do I just enumerate every possible relevant import and include a summary of their purpose? That seems excessively burdensome given the purported capabilities of these models. It also seems unlikely to result in reasonable code unless I explicitly document each callable method’s signature and purpose.
For what it’s worth, I know I’ve been pretty skeptical during our conversations but I really appreciate your feedback and the work you’ve been doing; it’s helping me recognize both the limitations of my own knowledge and the limitations of what I should reasonably expect from the models. Thank you, again.
Yes, I paste stuff in from larger projects all the time.
I'm very selective about what I give them. For example, if I'm working on a Django project I'll paste in just the Django ORM models for the part of the codebase I'm working on - that's enough for it to spit out forms and views and templates, it doesn't need to know about other parts of the codebase.
Another trick I sometimes use is Claude Projects, which allow you to paste up to 200,000 tokens into persistent context for a model. That's enough to fit a LOT of code, so I've occasionally dumped my entire codebase (using my https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt/ tool) in there, or selected pieces that are important like the model and URL definitions.
My experience with Copilot (which is admittedly a few months outdated; I never tried Cursor but will soon) shows that it’s really good at inline completion and producing boilerplate for me but pretty bad at understanding or even recognizing the existence of scaffolding and business logic already present in my projects.
> but I mostly just paste exactly what I want the model to know into a prompt.
Does this include the work you do on your larger projects? Do those larger projects fit entirely within the context window? If not, without RAG, how do you effectively prompt a model to recognize or know about the relevant context of larger projects?
For example, say I have a class file that includes dozens of imports from other parts of the project. If I ask the model to add a method that should rely upon other components of the project, how does the model know what’s important without RAG? Do I just enumerate every possible relevant import and include a summary of their purpose? That seems excessively burdensome given the purported capabilities of these models. It also seems unlikely to result in reasonable code unless I explicitly document each callable method’s signature and purpose.
For what it’s worth, I know I’ve been pretty skeptical during our conversations but I really appreciate your feedback and the work you’ve been doing; it’s helping me recognize both the limitations of my own knowledge and the limitations of what I should reasonably expect from the models. Thank you, again.