> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!

The kind of person who prefers this setup wants to read (and write) the least amount of code on their own. So their ideal workflow is one where they get to make programs through natural language. Making codebases understandable for this group is mostly a waste of effort.

It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all. Code is becoming just an intermediary artifact useless to machines, which can instead write machine code directly.

I wish someone could put this genie back in the bottle.

There is no amount of static material that will perfectly conform to the shape and contours of every mind that consumes that static material such that they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it.

Having a thing that is interactive and which can answer questions is a very useful thing. A slide deck that sits around for the next person is probably not that great, I agree. But if you desperately want a slide deck, then an agent like Claude which can create it on demand is pretty good. If you want summaries of changes over time, or to know "what's the overall approach at a jargon-filled but still overview level explanation of how feature/behavior X is implemented?", an agent can generate a mediocre (but probably serviceable) answer to any of those by reading the repo. That's an amazing swiss-army knife to have in your pocket.

I really used to be a hater, and I really did not trust it, but just using the thing has left me unable to deny its utility.

> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!

<laughs in legacy code>

And fundamentally, that isn't a function of "capital". All code bases are shaped by the implicit assumptions of their writers. If there's a fundamental mismatch or gap between reader and writer assumptions, it won't be readable.

LLMs are a way to make (some of) these implict assumptions more legible. They're not a panacea, but the idea of "just make it more understandable" is not viable. It's on par with "you don't need debuggers, just don't write bugs"