Some LLMs (Large Language Models) can act as useful programming assistants when provided with a project’s source code, but experimenting with this can get a little tricky if the chatbot has no way to download from the internet. In such cases, the code must be provided by either pasting it into the prompt or uploading a file manually. That’s acceptable for simple things, but for more complex projects, it gets awkward quickly.

To make this easier, [Eric Hartford] created github2file, a Python script that outputs a single text file containing the combined source code of a specified repository. This text file can be uploaded (or its contents pasted into the prompt) making it much easier to share code with chatbots.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that these tools represent more of an evolution than a revolution, and there are useful roles chatbots can play in programming. Some available chatbots have coding in mind. Others do not. But hackers being hackers we naturally want to experiment for ourselves regardless of a product’s intended uses, and a tool like this makes it easier to do that. Just remember their work — for now — is often at the intern level.