I use Copilot and it’s a game-changer for my productivity, but I really wish it was capable of natural language searching. So for example I could ask it “show me all places in the code where x is assigned a value but a flush() command is not immediately issued afterwards”.
I answer those kinds of questions by piping my entire codebase into a large context model (like Claude or o3-mini or Gemini) and prompting it directly.
Here's a recent example:
files-to-prompt datasette tests -e py -c | \
llm -m gemini-2.0-flash-exp -u \
'which of these files contain tests that indirectly exercise the label_column_for_table() function'
Yek is fantastic -- I've converted my whole team to using it for prompting. As input context windows keep increasing, I think it'll just keep becoming more and more valuable -- I can put most of my team's code in Gemini 2.0 now.
I've had the occasional large prompt that cost ~30c - I often use GPT-4o mini if I'm going to ask follow-up questions because then I get prompt caching without having to configure it.
> So for example I could ask it “show me all places in the code where x is assigned a value but a flush() command is not immediately issued afterwards”.
Could this not work? (with wathever flag to display the surrounding lines)
I think Cursor can do this, if you @codebase, isn’t there something similar in copilot? E.g., your codebase being vectorized, indexed, and used as an embedding?
I have had Cursor review all my file content solving similar things, but I would think it's limited to VSCode search capabilities and IMHO it's not great. I love how Pycharm handles indexing so search is fast and accurate. If they ever get agents going at the same quality as Cursor I would probably go to Pycharm for that advantage alone.
