4 ms·
In addition to what everyone else has said, run the codebase through a LLM, and ask it questions. If the code is private and privacy is a concern, look into sel
by imiric 4y ago
In addition to what everyone else has said, run the codebase through a LLM, and ask it questions. If the code is private and privacy is a concern, look into self-hosting the LLM. You might not be able to analyze the full repo yet, but you can inspect modules separately, and get a mental model of the codebase quicker than if you were manually inspecting it.
Also, read any technical documentation about the product, team/company processes, etc. You can quickly get an idea of how well the product is maintained if the documentation is up to date. If not, then submitting documentation patches is a good first step your teammates will appreciate.
- codeonline 4y ago> run the codebase through a LLM Do you have a good example of how to go about that?
- imiric 4y agoI don't, unfortunately. I haven't had the need to try it yet, but I would experiment with it if I was exploring a new codebase. There are some proprietary services that interface against GPT-3/4[1], though if privacy is a concern, it's getting increasingly easier to self-host LLMs. It seems like every day there's a new open source development that makes these tools more accessible. Just in the last few weeks we've seen llama.cpp, Alpaca, Dalai... New projects are appearing so frequently that it's hard to keep up. Their token size and quality is not yet at the GPT-4 level, so you can't analyze entire codebases yet, but they'd still be useful for smaller chunks of code. And at this pace we can expect great improvements soon. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35313506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35313506