[emporas]

Aider's repomap is a great idea. I remember participating in the discussion back then.

The unfortunate thing for Python that the repomap mentions, and untyped/duck-typed languages, is that function signatures do not mean a lot.

When it comes to Rust, it's a totally different story, function and method signatures convey a lot of important information. As a general rule, in every LLM query I include maximum one function/method implementation and everything else is function/method signatures.

By not giving mindlessly LLMs whole files and implementations, I have never used more than 200.000 tokens/day, counting input and output. This counts as 30 queries for a whole day of programming, and costs less than a dollar per day not matter which model I use.

Anyway, putting the agent to build the repomap doesn't sound such a great idea. Agents are horribly inefficient. It is better to build the repomap deterministically using something like ast-grep, and then let the agent read the resulting repomap.

[jared_stewart]

Typed languages definitely provide richer signal in there signatures - and my experience has been that I get more reliable generations from those languages.

On the efficiency point, the agent isn't doing any expensive exploration here. There is a standalone server which builds and maintains the index, the agent is only querying it. So it's closer to the deterministic approach implemented in aider (at least in a conceptual sense) with the added benefit that the LLM can execute targeted queries in a recursive manner.