by scotty79 | 2025-12-15 00:15:51+00:00
Let me give you an example of my workflow from tonight:

1. I had two text documents containing plain text to compare. One with minor edits (done by AI).

2. I wanted to see what AI changed in my text.

3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. I searched google for "text comparison tool but not line-based"

4. As second search result it found me https://www.diffchecker.com/ (It's a SaaS, right?)

5. Initially it did equally bad job but I noticed it had a switch "Real-time diff" which did exactly what I wanted.

6. I got curious what is this algorithm. So I asked Gemini with "Deep Research" mode: "The website https://www.diffchecker.com/ uses a diff algorithm they call real-time diff. It works really good for reformatted and corrected text documents. I'd like to know what is this algorithm and if there's any other software, preferably open-source that uses it."

7. As a first suggestion it listed diff-match-patch from Google. It had Python package.

8. I started Antigravity in a new folder, ran uv init. Then I prompted the following:

"Write a commandline tool that uses https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Language:-Py... to generate diff of two files and presents it as side by side comparison in generated html file."

[...]

"I installed the missing dependance for you. Please continue." - I noticed it doesn't use uv for installing dependencies so I interrupted and did it myself.

[...]

"This project uses uv. To run python code use

uv run python test_diff.py" - I noticed it still doesn't use uv for running the code so its testing fails.

[...]

"Semantic cleanup is important, please use it." - Things started to show up but it looked like linear diff. I noticed it had a call to semantic cleanup method commented out so I thought it might help if I push it in that direction.

[...]

"also display the complete, raw diff object below the table" - the display of the diff still didn't seem good so I got curious if it's the problem with the diffing code or the display code

[...]

"I don't see the contents of the object, just text {diffs}" - it made a silly mistake by outputting template variable instead of actual object.

[...]

"While comparing larger files 1.txt and 2.txt I notice that the diff is not very granular. Text changed just slightly but the diff looks like deleting nearly all the lines of the document, and inserting completely fresh ones. Can you force diff library to be more granular?

You seem to be doing the right thing https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Line-or-Word... but the outcome is not good.

Maybe there's some better matching algoritm in the library?" - it seemed that while on small tests that Antigravity made itself it worked decently but on the texts that I actually wanted to compare was still terrible although I've seen glimpses of hope because some spots were diffed more granularly. I inspected the code and it seemed to be doing character level diffing as per diff-match-patch example. While it processed this prompt I was searching for solution myself by clicking around diff-match-patch repo and demos. I found a potential solution by adjusting cleanup, but it actually solved the problem by itself by ditching the character level diffing (which I'm not sure I would have come up with at this point). Diffed object looked great but as I compared the result to https://www.diffchecker.com/ output it seemed that they did one minor thing about formatting better.

[...]

"Could you use rowspan so that rows on one side that are equivalent to multiple rows on the other side would have same height as the rows on the other side they are equivalent to?" - I felt very clumsily trying to phrase it and I wasn't sure if Antigravity will understand. But it did and executed perfectly.

I didn't have to revert a single prompt and interrupted just two times at the beginning.

After a while I added watch functionality with a single prompt:

"I'd like to add a -w (--watch) flag that will cause the program to keep running and monitor source files to diff and update the output diff file whenever they change."

[...]

So I basically went from having two very similar text files and knowing very little about diffing to knowing a bit more and having my own local tool that let's me compare texts in satisfying manner, with beautiful highlighting and formatting, that I can extend or modify however I like, that mirrors interesting part of the functionality of the best tool I found online. And all of that in the time span shorter than it took me to write this comment (at least the coding part was, I followed few wrong paths during my search for a bit).

My experience tells me that even if I could replicate what I did today (keeping motivated is an issue for me), it would most likely be multi-day project full of frustration and hunting small errors and venturing into wrong paths. Python isn't even my strongest language. Instead it was a pleasant and fun evening with occasional jaw drops and feeling so blessed that I live in SciFi times I read about as a kid (and adult).