This app lets your chatbot see your codebase

EffessDev — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:10:23 +0000

A coding agent that can read and edit files in your repository directly is out of reach for me. Since regular chatbots generally have generous free tiers, that is what I use regularly for coding.

Sometimes I want to give the chatbot some context about my existing code. What I generally do is copy and paste the relevant files, put them in code blocks, and type in the paths to those files.

However, giving the chatbot an idea of how the overall project is structured (files and folders) is crucial for optimal outputs. Doing this manually is really hard.

What I used to do was run the tree command and copy its output. But this includes files that are not included in version control (such as node_modules), which can get high in number and clutter the output. I found out that I can use the --gitignore flag to only include tracked files, but the overall workflow was still slow.

I found some good options online (such as RepoMix), but they seemed to be much more complex than what I needed or optimized for slightly different things.

So, with the help of AI, I quickly created a Python app optimized for my specific workflow, and named it ReptClip. Here is how it works.

App overview

The installation is super simple. You can run the command pip install reptclip (or pipx in Ubuntu) to install and use the app.

When you run the app from your terminal, relevant parts of your codebase, such as the project structure and the files you specify, are copied straight to your clipboard! No output files, no manual copying. You can paste it into the chat box and start typing your prompt right away.

For example, an output might look like this:

# Project structure

```
AGENTS.md
README.md
docs/README.md
src/main.py
src/functions.py
```

# AGENTS.md

```
Contents of AGENTS.md
```

# src/main.py

```
Contents of main.py
```

# Prompt

<- cursor will be here,
   you can quickly start typing your prompt

As you can see, it only uses a few tokens too!

Features

You can use the -i or --include and -e or --exclude flags to specify which files to include. Glob patterns (** and *) as well as relative paths are supported. Simply running the command without any arguments (reptclip or rrcc) will only copy the project structure. Even that only saves a ton of time for a lot of people. Click here for basic usage instructions.

I also added an alias rrcc so that you can launch the app either using the full name reptclip or the quicker rrcc command from the terminal. rrcc can be typed using only your left hand.

Moreover, you can create a reptclip-config.toml file (use the config command to create a default one) in the root of your repository for default include and exclude patterns for a specific project. The config file also supports presets, which you can define in the config file and select one or more of them using -p or --preset flag (see Advanced Usage for more details). The content of files over 1MB and binary files is not pasted, and a placeholder mentioning the reason is included instead. Binary files are identified using their extensions as well as their content.

Thanks

Thank you for reading till the end. If you found this app useful, please consider starring the repo and liking this post. If you have any suggestions, please let me know by writing a comment. Pull requests are also welcome if you are interested!

If you think I am overstating a simple project, I wouldn't blame you. I am just an 18-year-old kid (about to start college), anyway 🙄

Thanks for your support!

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Dual role of * in C

EffessDev — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:22:56 +0000

Prerequisites

Let's create a variable.

int myNum = 5;

Now, myNum refers to the value 5. However, we can get its memory address using the & operator like this: &myNum.

Role 1: Creating pointers

A pointer holds a memory address.

int *pointerToMyNum = &myNum;

Role 2: Modifying values using a pointer

In this case, * works as the dereference operator.

*pointerToMyNum = 10;

Now, if we print myNum, the output will be 10.

Understanding that they are different in each context makes things much easier ✨

Note

Both int *ptr and int* ptr are functionally identical in C.

Indexes: Quickstart Using PostgreSQL

EffessDev — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:35:06 +0000

Let's consider a table user. When we execute a query to find Emily, we are actually going through each record, looking whether the name column equals Emily. Indexes comes in when you want to speed this up.

Let's create an Index with the name idx_users_name (the name can be anything, and it doesn't matter functionally):

CREATE INDEX idx_users_name ON users (name);

Now when you run

SELECT * FROM users WHERE name = 'Emily';

Postgres will use the index we just created (not by the name, the name is just for us) to execute that query, and the time complexity is reduced from O(n) to O(log n).

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