5 ms·

Show HN: Davia – Open source visual, editable wiki from your codebase

47 points by ruben-davia 11mo ago

Hi HN, We’re Ruben, Afnan, and Theo, and we’re building Davia to solve a common problem: documenting and explaining large codebases is complex. It takes too long to generate even a first draft of a wiki, visuals are essential to understand the structure, internal docs should be editable in the IDE, and most solutions aren’t open. Davia is an open source tool. You enter the path of your repo, and it generates a visual wiki you can explore and edit. Diagrams are created automatically, and you can update everything either in your IDE or in a Notion-like editor. The project is still early, and we’d love to hear feedback, ideas, or experiences from anyone interested in documenting and sharing code internally. GitHub: https://github.com/davialabs/davia https://github.com/davialabs/davia

krat0sprakhar 11mo ago
Looks interesting and would love to try it out on my side project, but it'd be great if you could add your own package (https://github.com/davialabs/davia/tree/main/packages/agent https://github.com/davialabs/davia/tree/main/packages/agent) as a showcase.
- ruben-davia 11mo ago
  Thanks! We’ve actually added our own package as a showcase: https://davia.ai/share/d9c79723-11a6-4a5b-a14b-04ddaa9f123f/davia-agent https://davia.ai/share/d9c79723-11a6-4a5b-a14b-04ddaa9f123f/....
  - esperent 11mo ago
    It's just one short page? Or am I missing something?
    - ruben-davia 11mo ago
      There are actually 5 sub-pages. Also, the link I sent is a ‘share’ version, so it’s not editable once published.
      - esperent 11mo ago
        Ah I see why I missed it. You've hijacked the main site hamburger icon in the header to show navigation for the demo project. I assumed that hamburger icon still went to this like /Pricing, /Docs, /Blog
        ruben-davia 11mo ago
        Yes, good catch, we’ll change the UI. Thanks!
Kyrio 11mo ago
This looks like it could be a sensible way to use LLMs in programming, although I'm not convinced AI-generated documentation can give meaningful explanations rather than paraphrase. However, since the generated wiki is editable, it seems it can be used to give a kick start to internal documentation and let the actual devs step in when it's required. I'm skittish about genAI in the workplace (or anywhere really) but this could be valuable. However, and this might have been naïve of me, but I expected some sort of local model. And I see that you have to bring in your own vendor API keys, which implies that you let AI companies mine your codebase. Isn't that a no-go for most companies? So far I've only worked in places that banned ChatGPT over IP concerns like these. Is it already common for businesses to feed their codebases to third party LLMs?
- whiskyontheice 11mo ago
  [dead]
- ruben-davia 11mo ago
  Exactly. The wiki is editable so AI gives a first draft, and developers refine it. Some companies are fine with vendor APIs, but we’ll add local model support for full privacy.
- itsn0tm3 11mo ago
  But what if you edited a section about code piece A and then you change that code? Does it have permission to overwrite? Seems like a fairly hard problem to solve.
  - ruben-davia 11mo ago
    Yes, hard problem, we are working on this
esperent 11mo ago
Looks interesting but it needs some demos using real world complex projects. Point it at famous open source projects like React, or three.js, and use those as examples on the homepage.
- ruben-davia 11mo ago
  Thanks! On our homepage (https://davia.ai/showcase https://davia.ai/showcase) we already showcase examples like AI SDK, E2B, GPT OSS, and Transformers. We’ll also add more examples directly on our GitHub soon.
  - esperent 11mo ago
    Ah I missed those. Would definitely be great to have some non AI projects there.
    - ruben-davia 11mo ago
      Yes, definitely add some non-AI projects too!
  - Zardoz84 11mo ago
    Nearly useless examples. Put something like Spring, so we could compare against DeepWiki or something similar
potamic 11mo ago
What's the token usage and time taken to run this for a given repository?
- ruben-davia 11mo ago
  Roughly 300K to 1M tokens in total. It’s big, but should only happen once per repo. And around 2 minutes to run.
  - potamic 11mo ago
    Are you sure 2 minutes? That's 1000+ tokens/sec.
    - ruben-davia 11mo ago
      Yes. Most of the tokens are input tokens.

47 points by ruben-davia 11mo ago

krat0sprakhar 11mo ago

Looks interesting and would love to try it out on my side project, but it'd be great if you could add your own package (https://github.com/davialabs/davia/tree/main/packages/agent https://github.com/davialabs/davia/tree/main/packages/agent) as a showcase.

ruben-davia 11mo ago
Thanks! We’ve actually added our own package as a showcase: https://davia.ai/share/d9c79723-11a6-4a5b-a14b-04ddaa9f123f/davia-agent https://davia.ai/share/d9c79723-11a6-4a5b-a14b-04ddaa9f123f/....
- esperent 11mo ago
  It's just one short page? Or am I missing something?
  - ruben-davia 11mo ago
    There are actually 5 sub-pages. Also, the link I sent is a ‘share’ version, so it’s not editable once published.
    - esperent 11mo ago
      Ah I see why I missed it. You've hijacked the main site hamburger icon in the header to show navigation for the demo project. I assumed that hamburger icon still went to this like /Pricing, /Docs, /Blog
      - ruben-davia 11mo ago
        Yes, good catch, we’ll change the UI. Thanks!

Kyrio 11mo ago

This looks like it could be a sensible way to use LLMs in programming, although I'm not convinced AI-generated documentation can give meaningful explanations rather than paraphrase. However, since the generated wiki is editable, it seems it can be used to give a kick start to internal documentation and let the actual devs step in when it's required. I'm skittish about genAI in the workplace (or anywhere really) but this could be valuable. However, and this might have been naïve of me, but I expected some sort of local model. And I see that you have to bring in your own vendor API keys, which implies that you let AI companies mine your codebase. Isn't that a no-go for most companies? So far I've only worked in places that banned ChatGPT over IP concerns like these. Is it already common for businesses to feed their codebases to third party LLMs?

whiskyontheice 11mo ago
[dead]
ruben-davia 11mo ago
Exactly. The wiki is editable so AI gives a first draft, and developers refine it. Some companies are fine with vendor APIs, but we’ll add local model support for full privacy.
itsn0tm3 11mo ago
But what if you edited a section about code piece A and then you change that code? Does it have permission to overwrite? Seems like a fairly hard problem to solve.
- ruben-davia 11mo ago
  Yes, hard problem, we are working on this

esperent 11mo ago

Looks interesting but it needs some demos using real world complex projects. Point it at famous open source projects like React, or three.js, and use those as examples on the homepage.

ruben-davia 11mo ago
Thanks! On our homepage (https://davia.ai/showcase https://davia.ai/showcase) we already showcase examples like AI SDK, E2B, GPT OSS, and Transformers. We’ll also add more examples directly on our GitHub soon.
- esperent 11mo ago
  Ah I missed those. Would definitely be great to have some non AI projects there.
  - ruben-davia 11mo ago
    Yes, definitely add some non-AI projects too!
- Zardoz84 11mo ago
  Nearly useless examples. Put something like Spring, so we could compare against DeepWiki or something similar

potamic 11mo ago

What's the token usage and time taken to run this for a given repository?

ruben-davia 11mo ago
Roughly 300K to 1M tokens in total. It’s big, but should only happen once per repo. And around 2 minutes to run.
- potamic 11mo ago
  Are you sure 2 minutes? That's 1000+ tokens/sec.
  - ruben-davia 11mo ago
    Yes. Most of the tokens are input tokens.