Allow to force the full file content to be provided with @file and @folder providers

[mkende]

Validations

• [x] I believe this is a way to improve. I'll try to join the Continue Discord for questions
• [x] I'm not able to find an open issue that requests the same enhancement

Problem

When using models with large context windows it is now possible to pass large parts of the codebase. However, the @file and @folder (and @codebase) providers always use the indexing mechanism to pass only some section of the files and some subset of the available files.

For some rewrite tasks or when using complex API being able to pass an entire file or to force all the files of a folder to be passed would help. This could either be done through params of these providers or through context menu when they are added (possibly activated only with some options)

Solution

No response

[Patrick-Erichsen]

I believe this is only the case for @codebase and @folder? Could you take a look at the prompt logs to verify with an example on your own machine?

I could see this being a useful toggle for @folder. For full codebase content we generally recommend third party tools like Repomix.

[mkende]

You are right that @file works as I expect it, I’m not sure why I thought otherwise.

I think that the option could be useful for both @codebase and @folder and also they have the same set of options today so it might make sense to give them both that option. But given that the @folder is recursive, having that option available only for that provider would be good enough for me.

[chezsmithy]

One trick I use is to go into agent mode and ask the agent to traverse a particular folder reading each file to build a temporary summary markdown file. Then as I'm making code changes I'll reference that file in my context as I work.

If I need to refresh my context then it's always easy to start by providing that file as a starting point.

[Patrick-Erichsen]

@mkende - I would be curious if trying the Repomix MCP server works for you. I'm not sure when/if we'll decide to make folder/codebase more configurable, but I think if you were to use repomix in agent mode with a prompt like "use repomix to pack the contents of folder/subfolder", it would work.

Lmk your thoughts if you give it a try!

[mkende]

This sounds promising although it requires a bit of setup with some overhead in the prompt and the model that I’m using (codestral) does not support agent mode for now.

So I’ll probably just use repomix manually as it’s reasonably convenient until this can be implemented (if you decide to do so at some point).

Thanks for the pointers and suggestions.

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