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BloopAI
bloop
Rust2023–2024
BloopAI / bloop · Archived

bloop

bloop is a fast code search engine written in Rust.

6Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

bloop is a fast code search engine written in Rust.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month13 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-03-14 14:42:35 UTC to 2024-04-11 07:35:41 UTC.

012342023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 commentsMar 20232023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsSep 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsApr 2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Mar 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC413
Apr 20232023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC110
May 20232023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC312
Jul 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Aug 20232023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20232023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20232023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

13 sources
bloop (YC S21) | Rust AI Engineer | Onsite | London, UK We're a YC + tier-1 VC backed startup, working on an AI chat assistant for software developers that can answer questions about any large codebase. About you: you hack around with GPT on the weekend, maybe you even fine-tune some of these new open source models. But you're also a solid programmer, capable of not just prototyping a nice demo but also shipping performant code that can scale. You're probably quite good at what you do, maybe you were top of your class, or maybe you rose the ranks to your comfortable management role, but yearn for the days of writing code, redbull and deploying on a Friday. We're a small team, looking for one individual to join us in London, in-person at least 3 days per week. Please reach out to me at join [at] bloop [dot] ai with "HN Rust Engineer" in th
Read the rest
e subject line and a note about why this is exciting and a link to your portfolio or linkedin/resume. P.S. Our stack is Rust, so it's likely the role will go to a candidate with Rust experience but if you think you have something to offer that compensates for lack of Rust we should chat anyway! https://github.com/BloopAI/bloop
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2023)
bloop (YC S21) | Rust AI Engineer | Onsite | London, UK We're a YC + tier-1 VC backed startup, working on an AI chat assistant for software developers that can answer questions about any large codebase. About you: you hack around with GPT on the weekend, maybe you even fine-tune some of these new open source models. But you're also a solid programmer, capable of not just prototyping a nice demo but also shipping performant code that can scale. You're probably quite good at what you do, maybe you were top of your class, or maybe you rose the ranks to your comfortable management role, but yearn for the days of writing code, redbull and deploying on a Friday. We're a small team, looking for one individual to join us in London, in-person at least 3 days per week. Please reach out to me at join [at] bloop [dot] ai with "HN AI Engineer" in the
Read the rest
subject line and a note about why this is exciting and a link to your portfolio or linkedin/resume. P.S. Our stack is Rust, so it's likely the role will go to a candidate with Rust experience but if you think you have something to offer that compensates for lack of Rust we should chat anyway! https://github.com/BloopAI/bloop
In Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2023)
louiskw·Jun 9, 2023Submission

Show HN: Bloop – Answer questions about your code with an LLM agent

Hi HN! We launched bloop 10 weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236275) and received a huge amount of feedback (both positive + constructive). We've undertaken a rewrite of the core search framework, which now acts as an LLM agent, significantly improving the number of queries that can be successfully answered. There's a bunch of hype surrounding LLM agents, but we're positive this is one of the first implementations of an agent that can deliver immediate value for engineers working on existing projects, especially larger ones. We'll do a full write up of how the agent works and the tools it can use soon, but we wanted to share our progress, now that we've got a stable release. bloop is a developer assistant that uses GPT-4 to answer questions about your codebase. The agent searches both your local and remote repositories wi
Read the rest
th natural language, regex and filtered queries. Some of the ways engineers use bloop to improve their efficiency when working on large codebases: - Summarise how large files work and how multiple files work together - Understand how to use open source libraries when documentation is lacking - Identify the origin of errors - Ask questions about English-language codebases in other languages - Reduce code duplication by checking for existing functionality - Write new code, taking into account existing codebase context (eg: "write a dockerfile for this project") bloop runs as a free desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux: https://github.com/bloopAI/bloop/releases/latest. On desktop, your code is indexed with a MiniLM embedding model and stored locally, meaning at index time your codebase stays private. 'Private' here means that no code is shared with us or OpenAI at index time, and when a search is made only relevant code snippets are shared to generate the response. (This is more or less the same data usage as Copilot). We also have a paid cloud offering for teams ($45 per user per month). Members of the same organisation can search a shared index hosted by us and will get access to enterprise only features down the line (currently there's no feature gap between desktop and cloud).
118 points · Open discussion
It seems you're doing the opposite of "missing the forest for the trees". You see the forest (the app) but you're not seeing the individual trees. The answer to why companies don't have one interface with GPT is that they would still need to invest time and money into building the application that uses GPT. Checkout the bloop source code to get an idea of what's needed https://github.com/bloopAI/bloop there are also many complex things to deal with. You can't just shove an entire codebase into GPT-4, it has limited ability to track context. The codebase needs to be indexed and stored in a way that sematic search can be done on it very quickly. Every app has their own unique challenges towards getting the data into GPT and making it fast. TL;DR companies are buying apps that use GPT-4 API, not just access to GPT-4. They'd rather buy the ap
Read the rest
ps instead of building and maintaining them.
In Launch HN: Bloop (YC S21) – Code Search with GPT-4
Query flow looks to be roughly along the lines of: - llm rephrases the last conversation entry into a standalone, context-free search query - rephrased query is embedded, top-k results retrieved from the vector db - llm selects a top-1 winner from the top-k results - llm answers the question given conversational context and the top-1 code search result (from https://github.com/BloopAI/bloop/blob/8905a36388ce7b9dadaedf...)
In Launch HN: Bloop (YC S21) – Code Search with GPT-4
louiskw·Mar 20, 2023Submission

Launch HN: Bloop (YC S21) – Code Search with GPT-4

Hey HN, we’re the cofounders of bloop (https://bloop.ai/), a code search engine which combines semantic search with GPT-4 to answer questions. We let you search your private codebases either the traditional way (regex or literal) or via semantic search, ask questions in natural language thanks to GPT-4, and jump between refs/defs with precise code navigation. Here’s a quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/8e9d59b88dd2409482ec02cdda5b9185 Traditional code search tools match the terms in your query against the codebase, but often you don’t know the right terms to start with, e.g. ‘Which library do we use for model inference?’ (These types of questions are particularly common when you’re learning a new codebase.) bloop uses a combination of neural semantic code search (comparing the meaning - encoded in vector representations - of queries a
Read the rest
nd code snippets) and chained LLM calls to retrieve and reason about abstract queries. Ideally, a LLM could answer questions about your code directly, but there is significant overhead (and expense) in fine-tuning the largest LLMs on private data. And although they’re increasing, prompt sizes are still a long way off being able to fit a whole organisation’s codebase. We get around these limitations with a two-step process. First, we use GPT-4 to generate a keyword query which is passed to a semantic search engine. This embeds the query and compares it to chunks of code in vector space (we use Qdrant as our vector DB). We’ve found that using a semantic search engine for retrieval improves recall, allowing the LLM to retrieve code that doesn’t have any textual overlap with the query but is still relevant. Second, the retrieved code snippets are ranked and inserted into a final LLM prompt. We pass this to GPT-4 and its phenomenal understanding of code does the rest. Let’s work through an example. You start off by asking ‘Where is the query parsing logic?’ and then want to find out ‘Which library does it use?’. We use GPT-4 to generate the standalone keyword query: ‘query parser library’, which we then pass to a semantic search engine that returns a snippet demonstrating the parser in action: ‘let pair = PestParser::parse(Rule::query, query);’. We insert this snippet into a prompt to GPT-4, which is able to work out that pest is the library doing the legwork here, generating the answer ‘The query parser uses the pest library’. You can also filter your search by repo or language - What’s the readiness delay repo:myApp lang:yaml. GPT-4 will generate an answer constrained to the respective repo and language. We also know that LLMs are not always (at least not yet) the best tool for the job. Sometimes you know exactly what you’re looking for. For this, we’ve built a fast, trigram index based regex search engine based on Tantivy. Because of this, bloop is fast at traditional search too. For code navigation, we’ve built a precise go-to-ref/def engine based on scope resolution that uses Tree-sitter. bloop is fully open-source. Semantic search, LLM prompts, regex search and code navigation are all contained in one repo: https://github.com/bloopAI/bloop. Our software is standalone and doesn’t run in your IDE. We were originally IDE-based but moved away from this due to constraints on how we could display code to the user. bloop runs as a free desktop app on Mac, Windows and Linux: https://github.com/bloopAI/bloop/releases. On desktop, your code is indexed with a MiniLM embedding model and stored locally, meaning at index time your codebase stays private. Indexing is fast, except on the very largest repos (GPU indexing coming soon). ‘Private’ here means that no code is shared with us or OpenAI at index time, and when a search is made only relevant code snippets are shared to generate the response. (This is more or less the same data usage as Copilot). We also have a paid cloud offering for teams ($12 per user per month). Members of the same organisation can search a shared index hosted by us. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the product and where you think we should take it next, and your thoughts on code search in general. We look forward to your comments!
264 points · Open discussion

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