logoalt Hacker News

jakevoytkotoday at 1:12 AM2 repliesview on HN

My side project is now codebase explainability. I basically don't buy the premise that we just have to give up on comprehension as code generation scales; I just think that text is too limited by itself. So going a step deeper than asking Claudex "teach me this project", but having it produce a navigable snapshot of what's going on.

Big bang prototypes have been pretty awful, even after feeding the LLMs huge documents / wishlists / descriptions of how it should work, etc. Part of the experiment was giving LLMs some leeway to make product decisions with a lot of north star guidance, but AFAICT they are really bad at this. I also tried basic bottom-up efforts, which have been better but obviously more tedious. Now I'm trying to find a more scalable bottom-up approach that is more LLM-accelerated


Replies

boron1006today at 2:03 AM

I posted about my project below - https://github.com/0x007BA7/codebook

But maybe you should checkout the tools it’s based on, sem - https://github.com/Ataraxy-Labs/sem and ultimately treesitter. They at least give a more structured approach to dealing with code than simple text.

show 1 reply
hervaltoday at 1:43 AM

Any promising techniques so far? I’m working on a rather large monorepo and very few people on the team are managing to keep up with it. Looking for ideas to improve comprehension.

show 2 replies