alt Hacker News> isn't that just copilot "explain", one of the earliest copilot capabilities. It's definitely helpful to understand new codebases at a high level
In my experience this function is quite useless. It will just repeat the code in plain English. It will not explain it.
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kfajdsl • 04/03/2025
Haven’t tried copilot but cursor is pretty good at telling me where things are and explaining the high level architecture of medium-largeish codebases, especially if I already vaguely know what I’m looking for. I use this a lot when I need to change some behavior of an open source project that I’m using but previously haven’t touched.
I was actually positively surprised at how well even qwen2.5-coder:7b managed to talk through a file of Rust. I'm still a current-day-LLM-programming skeptic but that direction, code->English, seems a lot safer, since English is ambiguous anyway. For example, it recognized some of the code shapes and gave English names that can be googled easier.