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I'm paying $30/month for Gemini. It's worth every damn penny and then some and then some and then some. It's absolutely amazing at code reviews. Much more thorough than a human code reviewer, including me. It humbles me sometimes, which is good. Unless you can't use Google products, I'd seriously give it a try.

Now, I do still use ChatGPT sometimes. It recently helped me find a very simple solution to a pretty obscure compiler error that I'd never encountered in my several decades long career as a developer. Gemini didn't even get close.

Most of the other services seem focused on using the AWS pay-as-you-go pricing model. It's okay to use that pricing model but it's not easy for me to pitch it at work when I can't say exactly what the monthly cost is going to be.

I still love being a developer, but, knowing what I know now, I feel like I'd like it a lot less without Gemini. I'm much more productive and less stressed too. And I want to add, about the stress: being a developer is stressful sometimes. It can be a cold, quiet stress too, not necessarily a loud, hot stress. AI helps solve so many little problems very quickly, what to add/remove from a make file, why my code isn't linking. Or tricky stuff like using intrinsics. Holy fuck! It's really amazeballs.






How do you get Gemini to do a code review? Do you just paste the code into the web UI?

It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste.

When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini.

Then we go over it.

I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.


It seems most people aren’t worried about handing their code over to LLMs. Why is that? Isn’t there a concern that they will just train on your code? What if you’re trying to build a business, is there a fear that your idea or implementation will just get stolen or absorbed into the LLM and spit out into someone else’s code base? Or do people just not care anymore because code is so trivial to generate that it’s not worth very much?

Most llms have a privacy mode, including windsurf, that state they don’t use your input for training. But I think your last sentence is key, code is hardly ever so unique that it’s super valuable by itself. Ideas can be copied easily. For most software, it’s the whole package: really tackling the user problem, with the best user experience, with the right pricing, training, enablement, support, roadmap, community, network effect, etc.

Thanks that makes sense!

In my case, the code is public facing.

"concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file"

I think simonw has a tool that also does something like this? Edit- found it:

https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt


I have found Repomix[1] to be a good and straightforward tool for the task.

[1]: https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix


Nice this looks great too

I rolled my own, but it's exactly this.



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