DevAssist 🚀🤖

Your AI Coding Copilot's Best Friend! 🦾

A lightweight CLI toolkit to bridge the gap between your local code and your favorite AI assistant.

---

"Made for developers by a developer and an AI assistant."

---

🤔 Why Does DevAssist Exist?

Ever found yourself in a loop of...

• 😭 Trying to paste your entire project into a chat window, only to hit the context limit?
• 😵‍💫 Manually copying and pasting a dozen files, losing all sense of the project's structure?
• 🧩 Pasting just an error message, knowing the AI needs more context but not wanting to find and copy it all?
• 🥱 Writing boring commit messages when an AI could do it better with the right git diff?

DevAssist is here to fix that! It's a simple, powerful toolkit designed to eliminate the friction between your local development workflow and Large Language Models (LLMs). It programmatically packages your code, diffs, and errors into perfect, context-rich prompts, so you can spend less time copy-pasting and more time building.

✨ Features

• 📦 export: Bundle your entire project structure and code into a single, clean text file.
• 🧠 Intelligent Framework Detection: Automatically detects your project's framework (React, Vue, Django, etc.) to give your AI better high-level context.
• 🔪 chunk: Slice large files into AI-friendly, digestible chunks with a handy table of contents.
• 🎭 diff: Show a Git-style diff to your AI, providing crucial "before and after" context.
• 🚑 error: Instantly package an error log with the relevant code snippet that caused it.
• ✍️ commit: Generate a context-aware git diff to have an AI write your commit messages for you.

📦 Installation

Install it globally using npm to get access to the devassist command from anywhere on your system!

npm install -g @devassist-for-ai/devassist

Note: Even though the package name is scoped, the command you'll run is still the simple and convenient devassist!

🛠️ Usage Guide

devassist export

Exports your project code and structure into a single file. It intelligently detects your framework to give your AI the best possible context.

Usage:

# Export the whole project (with automatic framework detection)
devassist export

# Export only specific folders/files to a custom output file
devassist export --only src,package.json --output context.md

# Exclude specific folders
devassist export --exclude tests,dist

# Manually specify the framework to override detection
devassist export --framework "Next.js"

devassist chunk <file>

Splits a large file into smaller parts, perfect for staying within an AI's context limit.

Usage:

# Chunk a file into default 150-line parts and print to console
devassist chunk src/utils/file-handler.js

# Chunk into 50-line parts and save to a file
devassist chunk src/very-big-file.js --max-lines 50 --output chunks.txt

devassist diff <file> [commit]

Generates a diff of a file against the last commit (HEAD) or a specific commit hash.

Usage:

# See changes in a file compared to the last commit
devassist diff src/commands/export.js

# Compare against a specific commit
devassist diff src/commands/export.js a1b2c3d

devassist error <logfile>

Grabs an error from a log file and bundles it with the surrounding code for easy debugging with an AI.

Usage:

# (First, you need a log file with an error in it!)
# Then run:
devassist error logs/app-error.log

This will output a perfectly formatted block to copy to your AI.

devassist commit

Generates a context bundle from your staged Git changes, ready for an AI to write a commit message.

Usage:

# 1. Stage your changes
git add .

# 2. Generate the context (just the diff)
devassist commit

# 3. Or generate a more detailed context (full file contents)
devassist commit --full

⚙️ Configuration

For project-specific rules, create a .aiconfig.json file in your project's root. The default configuration already supports a wide variety of languages and ignores common directories like node_modules.

Example .aiconfig.json:

{
  "ignoreDirs": ["node_modules", ".git", "dist", "coverage", ".next"],
  "ignoreFiles": [".env.local"],
  "includeExt": [".js", ".ts", ".tsx", ".json", ".md"]
}

💬 A Word From The Creators

This is a fun hobby project built to solve a problem we face every day. It's a collaboration between a human developer (Md Siam Mia) and the very AI systems it's designed to help.

We believe this human-AI partnership is the future of software development, and tools like DevAssist are a small step toward making that future more efficient and enjoyable for everyone.

🙏 Contributing

Found a bug? Have a great idea? We'd love your help! This is an open-source project for the community. Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.