Advanced: becoming a Sweep power user 🧠

Usage 📖

Mention important files

To ensure that Sweep scans a file, mention the file name in your ticket. Sweep searches for relevant files at runtime, but specifying the file helps avoid missing important details.

Giving Sweep feedback

If Sweep's plan isn't accurate, you can respond to Sweep in three places:

Issue: Sweep will create a new pull request and close the old one. Alternatively, you can edit the issue description to recreate the pull request.
Pull request: Sweep will update the PR based on your PR comments
Code: Sweep will only update the file that the comment is on

Whenever you make a message that Sweep is taking a look at, you will see an 👀 emoji. If you don't see this, make sure the PR/issue is open and you prefixed the message with "sweep:".

Further, on failed Github Action runs, Sweep will update the PR based on the error message.

Configuration 🛠️

Use GitHub Actions

We highly recommend linters, as well as Netlify/Vercel preview builds. Sweep auto-corrects based on linter and build errors, and Netlify and Vercel helps with iteration cycles by providing previews of static sites using Netlify.

Set up `sweep.yaml`

You can set up sweep.yaml to

Provide up to date docs by setting up docs (https://docs.sweep.dev/config#docs (opens in a new tab))
Set up automated formatting and linting by setting up sandbox (https://docs.sweep.dev/config#sandbox (opens in a new tab)). Never have Sweep commit a failing npm lint again.
Give Sweep a high level description of where to find files in your repo by editing the repo_description field.

For more on configs, check out https://docs.sweep.dev/config (opens in a new tab).

Prompting 🗣️

Use an imperative tone when writing comments

This means writing the comment as a command or instruction. For example, instead of writing 'This line of code needs to be optimized', write 'Optimize this line of code'. Using an imperative tone makes the action required clear and direct.

Be specific

Don’t write “fix typos”, "write tests" or “fix the first error”. Sweep will get confused and might crash. Put a real issue that you would like solved in your codebase, with as much detail as you would provide a junior developer.

Recipes

To get the best performance from Sweep, we recommend the following approach to writing GitHub issues.

For harder problems, try to provide the same information a human would need. For simpler problems, providing a single line and a file name should suffice.

A good issue might include:

Where to look [file name or function name]	What to do [change the logic to do this]	Additional Context (optional) [there's a bug/we need this feature/there's this dependency]
In `sweepai/app/ui.py`	use an os-agnostic temp directory	N/A
In `on_comment.py`	we should not fire an event	because it's possible that the comment is on a closed PR
In the config loader in `packages/server/src/config.ts`	add a third option called "env" to load the config settings from environment variables	At present, there are two options: 1. ... and 2. ...

If you want Sweep to use a file, try to mention the full path. Similarly, to have Sweep use a function, try to mention the class method or what it does. Also see ✨ Tips and tricks for Sweep (opens in a new tab).

Limitations:

Sweep is unlikely to complete complex issues on the first try, similar to the average junior developer. Here are Sweep's limitations(for now):

Try to change less than 300 lines of code
Try to modify less than 5 files

Tutorial Config