Repository navigation
Make the directory listing limit configurable in the system prompt #2541
Description
Right now the files pushed into the system prompt as output from Ripgrep.tree are pretty much useless on a large enough project. The breadth-first nature of it makes it prioritize shallow files, and most useful files are more deeply nested in a lot of projects. For example here's some stats from my rails app
git ls-files - 1168
git ls-files app - 667
git ls-files app/models app/controllers - 228 (100% of this gets ignored currently)
And on top of that, the output is kind of nonsensical, i'm not sure the model is going to make heads of tails of this. For example this is what my /app directory ends up looking like in the prompt
app/
assets/
builds/
[1 truncated]
[2 truncated]
channels/
application_cable/
[2 truncated]
[7 truncated]
constants/
date_formats.rb
controllers/
baskets/
[3 truncated]
[41 truncated]
errors/
user_facing_error.rb
helpers/
content_filters/
[1 truncated]
[37 truncated]
javascript/
actions/
[1 truncated]
[6 truncated]
jobs/
chat/
[1 truncated]
[4 truncated]
lib/
assertion.rb
mailers/
application_mailer.rb
[2 truncated]
models/
[64 truncated]
views/
[32 truncated]
There's at least two config options that would help improve this:
- Make the limit configurable
- Allow for directory scopes to be applied
And some kind of better formatting that gives a relationship between directories and files as this is all disjointed. Maybe something like
# app/controllers
- this_controller.rb
- that_controller.rb
# app/models
- this.rb
- that.rb
# app/models/this
- taggable.rb
- joinable.rb
this would keep the paths from being repeated, but also give them some element of emphasis that would actually match things like error output.
Activity
github-actions commentedon Sep 11, 2025
This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:
Feel free to ignore if none of these address your specific case.
rekram1-node commentedon Sep 11, 2025
just going to assign it to you since I saw the exchange in discord
taqtiqa-mark commentedon Oct 14, 2025
@Cluster444 IIUC, this will be affected by allowing users more control of the context via
/addand/drop, see #1990. Is that correct ?There is also the question of whether the raw files are added to the context or a tree-sitter extract?
Cluster444 commentedon Oct 15, 2025
No I dont think that would affect what I was getting at here. This is a builtin that is dumping a directory tree directly into system instructions, and on even small projects it renders it quite useless because it saturates the 200 file limit with all the 1st and 2nd tier files, where most source code is 3-5 dirs deep in many projects, so they never show up.
taqtiqa-mark commentedon Oct 15, 2025
Yes, that destination is just plain, flat-out wrong.
Correct so a agent or command
/add folder/needed/one/*.tsand/add folder/two/*.html, where the tree-sitter data from those folders is added to the Context-Text, and not the User-Prompt-text, and definitely not the System-Prompt-Text.That would be a sane approach.
taqtiqa-mark commentedon Oct 15, 2025
Substantiating this claim:
See: #2108 (comment)
thdxr commentedon Mar 25, 2026
To stay organized issues are automatically closed after 90 days of no activity. If the issue is still relevant please open a new one.