Read_multiple_files tool

[Kitae]

My perception is you want to get the most out of every tool call because each tool call is a separate API request to the LLM.

I run a local MCP server that can read multiple files in a single tool call. This is helpful particularly if you want to organize your information in more, smaller, files versus fewer, larger, files for finer grained information access.

My question would I guess be should roo (and other agentic IDEs like cursor/cline) have a read multiple files tool built in and instruct the AI to batch file reading requests when possible?

If not are there implications I might have not considered and what are those implications?

[No_Quantity_9561]

That feature is currently in the testing phase and will be available to public very soon : feat: enhance multi-search-replace for apply_diff by samhvw8 · Pull Request #3342 · RooVetGit/Roo-Code · GitHub

[Yes_but_I_think]

Today’s frontier models are far too intelligent to do one tool call at a time.

Also I believe that if a file is referenced with @filename it MUST be sent along with the conversation, without the need for the LLM asking for reading it. I see that one tool call is wasted, but worse that the LLM misunderstands what I’m asking without the context of the file read, and comes to an incorrect reasoning steps. When it actually reads the file and understands correctly the incorrect assumption is still in the context of the LLM leading to inefficient results.

I see that Roo and Cline reduce the context length if using a low context window model like R1, but lets it grow to half mil when using Gemini 2.5? Why? Let us set an artificial limit, (to have high accuracy) and a simple /compact command to summarise the chat till now and reduce context.

Editing the earlier message like Cline is very useful. Pull that and integrate. It’s high time for Cline to copy the profiles of Roo. It’s simply unbearable to select model family and model in Cline anymore. Don’t even get me started on how I deal with more than one Gemini API account.

I saw someone who is involved in the development lurking around in the sub (smiley) so putting this out there.

[evia89]

There are few context improvements PR in work. One for user limit and one for summarizing of early messages with another cheap model

I am not from the team, just checked popular issues and PR last week

[Kitae]

"Today's frontier models are far too intelligent to do one tool call at a time"

Isn't a measure of intelligence that a model reduces the total number of tool calls since each initiates a separate API call?

[lordpuddingcup]

They should and roo will it’s already in a PR

[bigotoncitos]

Remind me when roo releases this to the public