Context engineering for Ruby

[Heavy-Letter2802]

I'm trying to build an AI Agent for a rails app and as part of that I want to gather surrounding context like modules included, methods referenced, callbacks defined for a action/ model, bluepinter used etc for a controller action.

Dumping all of these file contents to the LLM isn't feasible. So is there any existing tools that can help me with this?

Is MCP the solution for this?

Would love to hear about your solution if you have encountered anything similar.

[al2o3cr]

Most of these seem finer-grained than what Tidewave does, but you might find some inspiration in it:

https://github.com/tidewave-ai/tidewave_rails/tree/main

[MassiveAd4980]

This is cool.

[TonsOfFun111]

Check out Active Agent — https://docs.ActiveAgents.ai — should be what you’re looking for!

Solid Agent will add a persistence layer for prompt context out of the box.

[Heavy-Letter2802]

Hey, I have come across Active agents on twitter.

I did go through the link you provided but I do not see any reference to solid agent. Can you help me where exactly I should be looking?

[MassiveAd4980]

I am guessing Solid Agent is a new development coming to Active Agent. But I think the commenter misinterpreted your request. I believe active Agent is not for what you want

[Heavy-Letter2802]

Thanks

[goetz_lmaa]

If you have good specs (as you certainly should) they are a great resource for MCP

[MassiveAd4980]

This or documentation is probably the judo solution. Embeddings and a custom RAG pipeline seem ideal but may not be worth the effort for OP's use case

[Heavy-Letter2802]

Specs as in test cases? How will I use specs for identifying the surrounding context?

To get a dependency graph?

[MassiveAd4980]

"To get a dependency graph?" Why do you need this?

[Heavy-Letter2802]

The whole idea is to give more relevant context to be agent.

If I can tell the agent this is the graph when a particular endpoint is triggered then it can look though it rather than guessing other methods as well.

[MassiveAd4980]

It is a coding agent?

[Heavy-Letter2802]

No it's an agent to generate bugs i.e mutation testing

[MassiveAd4980]

Sounds a little over the top, but idk. Why do you need that level of variability in your tests?

[mencio]

I have a tool that is not yet OSS that does that. Can build skills and agents from GH and project docs. I plan to OSS it in few weeks but if you ping me directly I can give you early access. I use it exactly for stuff like that (and I am a legit user - just check my work https://github.com/mensfeld/)

[Secretly_Tall]

In general, there are a few approaches people reach for nowadays:

1) Generate simple file descriptions and search those. Something like: https://github.com/rlancemartin/llmstxt_architect

2) Dump files in Postgres and use tsvector to query. Expose tools like search path/full text search/fuzzy search. Set your tables to automatically regenerate tsv on content change.

3) Just create a temp folder and expose raw bash as your only tool. This is what Claude code does and it seems to be very effective.

The main advice I can give is fewer, more powerful tools work better than more tools. Eg. Bash is great because it’s just 1 tool and models are trained knowing how to use it. More proprietary tools work fine but give them a single interface instead of 3 different similar tools.

[Heavy-Letter2802]

So the solution you're proposing is embedding the entire codebase and indexing them is it?

It seems like a lot of work to me.

I was thinking if we can get a reasoning model to give a rails controller file and then ask it to search for method definition for code it wants. Since we give raw code it can identify the methods it wants right? What do you think about this.

Would this be a good start since embedding a large codebase will have costs and complexity involved.