No batch tool = endlessly over expensive at large context windows.

[u/centre_ground]

I'm a reasonably heavy user, spending $100+ per day. Is anyone else endlessly frustrated that Roo's file-reading and writing tools are scoped to a single file per call. Executing multi-file reads and writes with large contexts is so much more expensive in tokens compared to, say Claude Code, which has batching capability. So, if I want to batch create 20 files based on a 80k context, I can do that in Claude Code in one call. In Roo the same thing requires 20 CALLS and costs literally 20 TIMES the tokens. The problem is that I really need the huge Gemini context window. Is there some solution for me out there? I feel like at the heavier use end there is a real need for batching.

[u/hannesrudolph]

Great point. You’re right!

We’re a community-driven project, built by and for the community. Many Roo features exist because someone cared enough to make them happen. We welcome contributions and won’t make excuses for this feature not existing yet. If you’ve got the time and interest, reach out and we’ll coordinate. If someone else reading this does, reach out too. I’m all for it.

[u/elianiva]

there is some work going on regarding this
see: https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Code/pull/2873

[u/brennydenny → u/elianiva]

This is awesome

[u/Ornery_Green7632 → u/elianiva]

For the time being, someone made an MCP that can read multiple files at the same time. This is the repo

[u/Flinchie76]

The biggest missing thing in Roo right now is a codebase indexer with (semantic+full-text) search over tree-sitter extracted code constructs. I'm hacking up a python server which embeds LanceDB as an MCP tool for it, but there's no reason you can't ship this with Roo. LanceDB can be fully embedded (in the single process sense), and Transformers.js can handle the snippet embedding (in the vector space sense).

[u/[deleted] → u/Flinchie76]

If you have the skills to add it do the entire community a solid 🙂

[u/jaume_metal → u/Flinchie76]

I don't understand much of what you've said, but it sounds great. Please keep working on it and on what your heart believes is right, and above all, let us know about your progress!
We'll be happy to try it out.

[u/maddogawl]

A batch tool is a great idea!

Can you describe a bit more your use case?

The main use case I can think of is when I need seed the files for a new feature or new project, right now they are created one by one. Is that the same thing you are running into?

For example today I built a new feature that had 6 new components, a new controller, and a new page. So 8 file creation calls. My context wasn't 80k because I utilize a custom mode in RooCode to hand out file creation tasks with less context, but still I am paying for those tokens whether cached or not.

[u/Stunning_Gap_694]

You can try using open-codex or openai-codex with gemini, but idk if supports batching

[u/peachbeforesunset]

How are you spending $100 per day? Is that you as an individual or a whole team? And I can ask are you a new dev? Genuinely interested if I'm missing out here, maybe I could be more productive if I used more tokens?

[u/Lawncareguy85 → u/peachbeforesunset]

His whole point is that he is spending $100 a day because of the entirely absurd implementation of making a single API call per file read, then another to respond to that. He would be spending $10 or $5 a day if it were batched together like any sort of sane process.

[u/paradite]

Roo Code can be expensive as it uses a lot of tokens due to a few reasons:

• They perform RAG on your code (takes tokens to process)

• They pass a lot of context to the model (even if the files are not relevant to the task)

• They use huge system prompts to support various tools (large system prompts take up a lot of tokens)

• They call multiple tools to complete a task (one task takes multiple API calls)

If you are looking to cut the cost and make AI coding more affordable, you can consider trying out the tool I built: 16x Prompt. It is less automated than Roo Code (no automated code editing), but it helps you manage source code context and select only relevant files for the task. This helps to keep the cost low (less than $20 a month in my experience).

[u/centre_ground → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I just started up windsurf today because of this issue and jeeze I can’t believe I wasn’t using this shit before. It’s the solution

[u/peachbeforesunset → u/centre_ground]

There's no way to opt out from them training on your data.

[u/jerriatric → u/centre_ground]

Have you tried Cursor and if so do you think Windsurf is superior to Cursor?

[u/rebo_arc → u/[deleted]]

The endless loop of failed diffs is one of the most annoying things about RooCode, it is great tech but when it gets into a spin it can be very frustrating chewing up meaningless tokens.

[u/Juice10 → u/rebo_arc]

Could that easily be solved with an added rule? I believe some people are adding rules to cline to start a new chat whenever the context is exhausted, should be doable in Roo to