Significantly reduce token use and LLM confusion: SKIP includeFileDetails !

[dkamins]

Observation

Looking at the prompts generated for all new tasks, you can see Roo is including a recursive list of (up to 200) files in the project directory. When it hits that limit, it kindly informs the LLM:

(File list truncated. Use list_files on specific subdirectories if you need to explore further.)

This file list may make sense for small projects to give the LLM context of what is available.

Problem

For large projects this is worse than useless because the arbitrary list of files included is almost always irrelevant to the task at hand. This means wasting tokens (cost) and filling the context window up with information distracting to the LLM.

For example, in one project, my file list is consistently populated almost entirely with files from the project's /dev directory (build and test tools) and /data directory (test and runtime data), before it even gets alphabetically to /src, where it barely scratches the surface.

I clocked this file list text at 5604 characters and 1790 (!) tokens. I'm sure some projects with longer paths or filenames will be even bigger.

Proposal

I am proposing that either:

• this initial file list feature be disabled completely, and allow the LLM to request a list of files if it wants them,
• or add a mode-specific toggle option to include the list of files in the initial prompt.

This would save money while making the agent faster and smarter. Win win win.

Implementation Details

(Internally Roo is does this due to setup code in initiateTaskLoop, where it sets includeFileDetails = true for the first iteration. I will follow up this post with more details of the code path to illustrate this.)

[dkamins]

For reference, this is an overview of the code path discussed in OP relating to includeFileDetails.

Main task loop init:

private async initiateTaskLoop(userContent: UserContent): Promise<void> {
    let nextUserContent = userContent
    let includeFileDetails = true
    while (!this.abort) {
        const didEndLoop = await this.recursivelyMakeClineRequests(nextUserContent, includeFileDetails)
        includeFileDetails = false // we only need file details the first time

calls:

async recursivelyMakeClineRequests(
    userContent: UserContent,
    includeFileDetails: boolean = false,
): Promise<boolean> {

which calls:

async loadContext(userContent: UserContent, includeFileDetails: boolean = false) {

which calls:

async getEnvironmentDetails(includeFileDetails: boolean = false) {

which includes with a hard-coded 200 file limit:

    if (includeFileDetails) {
        details += `\n\n# Current Working Directory (${cwd.toPosix()}) Files\n`
        const isDesktop = arePathsEqual(cwd, path.join(os.homedir(), "Desktop"))
        if (isDesktop) {
            // don't want to immediately access desktop since it would show permission popup
            details += "(Desktop files not shown automatically. Use list_files to explore if needed.)"
        } else {
            const [files, didHitLimit] = await listFiles(cwd, true, 200)
            const result = formatResponse.formatFilesList(cwd, files, didHitLimit)
            details += result
        }
    }

which adds ~5KB of text, recursively listing fils in the project root, ending with:

(File list truncated. Use list_files on specific subdirectories if you need to explore further.)

which comes from (when didHitLimit is true):

formatFilesList: (absolutePath: string, files: string[], didHitLimit: boolean): string => {