repo2llm
Written on
repo2llm
A few months back I hacked together repo2llm, a pip package that allows
users to copy directory contents to their clipboard. It's built specifically for passing along context from coding
projects to an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT (typically through their respective web UIs).
I wrote the tool for my own sake. I found myself copying the contents of coding projects into Claude frequently,
and I was getting tired of going through the motions of collecting all the necessary context for my question(s). Now,
by writing repo2llm . into my terminal, I'm able to grab all the files in the project in a structured manner and
paste them into Claude's generous context window. This works great for relatively small projects,
When constructing the contents for the user's clipboard, files are tagged according to their location in the repo.
For example, here's the abbreviated output from repo2llm ./content in the source code for this blog:
<file name="01-first-post.md">
...
</file>
<file name="02-using-zwift-with-a-peloton.md">
...
</file>
<file name="03-repo2llm.md">
...
</file>
<file name="images/__init__.py">
...
</file>
I also built in some sensible defaults for ignoring files and directories, e.g. Python venvs, .git/, node_modules/,
and so on. These can be easily overridden if needed via a .repo2llm config file placed in the working directory.
Cursor et. al
Yes, there are many, many alternatives to this tool. Indeed, I use Cursor myself occasionally. However, I still find myself reaching for my own tool for several reasons:
- It's very easy to collect exactly the context I need
- I like using Claude's web UI, and this tool works well with it
- It feels good to make use of something you've built yourself
That said, it's clear that AI assisted coding is becoming more sophisticated every day. I fully
expect repo2llm to become obsolete for me within the year. Personally, I'm hoping JetBrains is able to get their
AI IDE product on a level comparable with Cursor - it's not even close right now.
PyCharm is my favourite IDE, though it's woefully behind in terms of AI integration as of writing.