alt Hacker NewsThis article is a bit all over the place. First, a slide deck to describe a codebase is not that useful. There's a reason why no one ever uses a slide deck for anything besides supporting an oral presentation.
Most of these things in the post aren't new capabilities. The automation of workflows is indeed valuable and cool. Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.
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The number one thing I have found LLMs useful for is producing mermaidjs diagrams of code. Now, I know they are not always perfect but it has been "good enough" very many times, and I have never seen hallucinations here, only omissions. If I notice something missing its super-easy to tell it to amend.
> Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.
Judging from the tone of the article, they’re using the term AGI in a jokey way and not taking themselves too seriously, which is refreshing.
I mean like, it wouldn’t be refreshing if the article didn’t also have useful information, but I do actually think a slide deck could be a useful way to understand a codebase. It’s exactly the kind of nice-to-have that I’d never want a junior wasting time on, but if it costs like $5 and gets me something minorly useful, that’s pretty cool.
Part of the mind-expanding transition to using LLMs involves recognizing that there are some things we used to dislike because of how much effort they took relative to their worth. But if you don’t need to do the thing yourself or burn through a team member’s time/sanity doing it, it can make you start to go “yeah fuck it, trawl the codebase and try to write a markdown document describing all of the features and requirements in a tabular format. Maybe it’ll go better than I expect, and if it doesn’t then on to something else.”
Also I don't trust it. They touched on that I think (I only skimmed).
Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable! Of course capital likes shortcuts and hacks to get the next feature out in Q3.