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Show HN: Pair: Open Tool for Coding with GPTs, Built by Coding with GPTs (github.com)

27 points by wskish ↗ HN
Github Copilot is a great tool for leveraging GPTs while coding, but I find that it is too “open loop” for more complex tasks that require Q&A, feedback to guide it in a particular direction, iteration on code execution errors, etc. There is a large class of tasks that are better accomplished in an iterative, stateful chat-like interface.

I have been experimenting with a local command line chat interface to GPT-4 and my mind was blown once again a few days ago when I copied documentation for a pretty involved API into the model context and managed to chat-guide GPT-4 to implement the API in under 30 minutes, complete with a ridiculous amount of unit test coverage.

This involved a lot of manual copy and pasting back and forth and other friction points that could be removed by a streamlined REPL interface optimized for code interactions. It occurred to me that it would be fun to build such a tool, and as the ultimate act of dogfooding, try to build it with GPT!

So PAIR is the starting point here. You can see a recent commit message has a log of my interactions with the model that produced that commit.

Next step is to add better mechanisms to manage the model input context (e.g. make it easy for the model to see the latest version of a source file when needed) followed by mechanisms for allowing the model to suggest changes via diffs that are quickly reviewed and accepted by the human in the loop before being applied to the file and tested.

I would love to hear from others who have experimented with GPT pair programming in a chat-style interface and any feedback you might have on your experience with it.

19 comments

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amy-why
An immediate benefit is that you can leverage the power of GPT-4 now for coding!
amy-why
Add a command to pair using pair. I just chatted with pair to add a /cd command. It starts with explaining the the code I was loading (pair.py) which was helpful. It helped me to write the code, can show the diff of changes.

I tested the code and find an issue, chatting with it and it fixed it. I like the work flow of chatting, and asking questions related to it while coding.

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mackatsol
Can you give us a walk through of a session?

While I think I understand what is going on, seeing it in action will make more sense. Thanks!

wskish
See https://github.com/jiggy-ai/pair/blob/main/example.md for a minimal example.

The bold parts are the user inputs.

First I give it a source file to put in the model context.

Then i give it an instruction, asking for a change to the source file to how two messages are output.

The model outputs a diff, which is extracted and presented for confirmation.

I accept the diff and the patch is applied to the source file.

amy-why
You can ask to summarize the code, suggest for improvements, new features... and then you can just ask it to implement them :).
ilaksh
Were you able to get the diff to work with GPT 3.5? It kept giving me incorrect line numbers. Not sure if I was doing something wrong or if I need GPT-4 for that.
wskish
Yes I see that some good percent of the time with GPT-4 as well. trying a few things to see if there is room for improvement.
wskish
I am having better luck having it output blocks of new code and then summarizing it as a diff. I think this is another case where the model has processing gain when it "thinks it through step by step" versus trying to jump to the final answer in the form of a diff.
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amy-why
We really appreciate any feedback, feature requests and contributions! Let's use Pair to pair programming together!
noonething
pretty cool! maybe something to do bash scripts or bash commands too, then you can just stay in the terminal
amy-why
Thanks! We captured this in our Github discussion thread.
euroderf
When the A.I.s take over, you will be treated kindly, for you will tutor them in how to improve themselves.