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It may be a good idea to refactor even if not for LLMs but for humans sake.


Right, but the discussion we're having here is context size. I, and others, are saying that the current context size is a limitation on when they can use the tool to be useful.

The replies of "well, just change the situation, so context doesn't matter" is irrelevant, and off-topic. The rationalizations even more so.


A huge context is a problem for humans too, which is why I think it's fair to suggest maybe the tool isn't the (only) problem.

Tools like Aider create a code map that basically indexes code into a small context. Which I think is similar to what we humans do when we try to understand a large codebase.

I'm not sure if Aider can then load only portions of a huge file on demand, but it seems like that should work pretty well.


As someone who's worked with both more fragmented/modular codebases with smaller classes and shorter files vs ones that span thousands of lines (sometimes even double digits), I very much prefer the former and hate the latter.

That said, some of the models out there (Gemini 2.5 Pro, for example) support 1M context; it's just going to be expensive and will still probably confuse the model somewhat when it comes to the output.




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