Contact info: Trevor Keith — [email protected]
Codapt demo — Building a chat app
Codapt allows you to make codebase-level changes to your Next.js application codebase based on English input. It will read and modify your codebase, figuring out how to accomplish your goal without human guidance.
Example requests:
add a navbar with the logo, log in and sign up buttonschange the color scheme from blue to greencreate a new API endpoint allowing the user to sign up with their phone number, sending a verification message using TwilioAt the ETHGlobal New York 2023 hackathon, I used Codapt to build AirTracker, a tool to track the location of AirTags on EVM-based blockchains, in less than 20 hours. Over 90% of the code was generated using Codapt, and AirTracker received the highest number of prizes out of the more than 300 projects and over 1000 developers, despite being built by me alone (along with Codapt) while other teams had up to five developers.
Here are more details, including the prompts used: Building AirTracker with Codapt
Copilot is a VS Code (IDE) extension that acts as an improved version of autocomplete — many (~30%) of developers are using it regularly. It will guess at a possible chunk of code to insert at the current cursor location, but it cannot modify code in other locations. This means that the developer needs to know where they want to add code. Furthermore, it can’t look at the entire codebase — it only looks at the open file(s) when suggesting code changes. This means that it’s frequently making incorrect assumptions about the rest of the codebase.
Most (60%) developers are currently using ChatGPT regularly in their job, with many paying $20 per month for the version that supports GPT-4. It can make recommendations on standalone pieces of code based on requests in natural language. It can also suggest modifications of specific chunks of code, but that requires copying in the code in question. It is reluctant to provide anything more than small changes, often providing a simplistic/incomplete change while explaining in natural language potential improvements that could be made to it.
Cursor is a full replacement IDE, based on VS Code. It adds a GPT chat box that has access to an embedding search result of the current query. This means that it has access to all files in the codebase, but it will only see relevant files if the query entered by the user is similar to text in the target files. In testing, this proved unreliable, with text needing to match almost exactly for the correct files to be found rather than having the AI give up completely.