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AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo
- esafak 11mo agoIt works! I love using it for open source repos.
- jasonjmcghee 11mo agoThis gets posted pretty frequently. 231 points | 77 days ago | 53 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002092
- cuuupid 11mo agoYMMV, my experience with DeepWiki is that it’s decent but the DX of the documentation is horrible and the diagrams are often just incorrect. Worth mentioning this is a Cognition / Devin on-ramp and has been posted on HN a few times in just a couple months, feels a little sales-y to me.
- jorvi 11mo agoFrom the title I assumed it would generate docs to put in the repo. But it's docs outside the dev's purview on a deepwiki url, used to shepherd people into Devin. Wow. Talk about slimy.
- 63stack 11mo agoJust another parasitic way of extracting value out of open source
- oblio 11mo agoThese comments should be pushed to the top of the pile.
- cyberax 11mo agoI insta-banned this site in Kagi. The trigger for me: utter disrespect for the user with unhideable glassy floating chatbox at the bottom of the page. And WTF with these floating boxes popping up everywhere?!? They are tailor-made to trigger anxiety in people with OCD. They look like a notification that keep grabbing your attention as you scroll the text. Example: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/secure-eks-clusters-with-the-new-support-for-amazon-eks-in-aws-backup/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/secure-eks-clusters-with-th...
- walterbell 11mo ago> floating boxes Will need boxblock.
- supriyo-biswas 11mo agoHelp yourself with https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-annoyance.txt https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-annoyance.txt or one of its variants.
- WhyNotHugo 11mo agoI tried a few different repositories (both my own and various other people’s projects). They all yield the same: No repositories found No repositories matching "https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/ImapGoose" were found. Probably broken/down right now?
- dataviz1000 11mo agoI've looked at mine and it take 10 to 15 minutes to process.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 11mo agoMaybe they only support github?
- Vinnl 11mo agoYeah, I wanted to try it on my (GitLab) repo as well, but it also said "No repositories found". Clicking "Index any public repo" pops up a dialog that says "Search for a GitHub repository" and "or Enter the URL of a public GitHub repository". So looks like it's not actually any repository.
- WhyNotHugo 11mo agoYeah, the site is pretty ambiguous. It says “any repository”, but they require a GitHub URL. That explains why none of the projects which I tried worked. I wonder why they’d use a descentralised protocol but then only support a single host.
- frumiousirc 11mo agodeepwiki doesn't spider. Repos are indexed upon request. The request dialog accepts a non-github URL.
- moffkalast 11mo agoNow I'm wondering who requested my repo lmao.
- typpilol 11mo agoI find it's better than context7, but that's not saying much
- _gmkt 11mo agoI'm very curious how this will turn out, and especially when :) https://github.com/cameyo42/newLISP-Code https://github.com/cameyo42/newLISP-Code
- _gmkt 11mo agoLooks really promising: https://deepwiki.com/cameyo42/newLISP-Code/3.1-newlisp-99-problems https://deepwiki.com/cameyo42/newLISP-Code/3.1-newlisp-99-pr...
- deevus 11mo agoWorks pretty well for gdzig https://deepwiki.com/gdzig/gdzig/1-overview https://deepwiki.com/gdzig/gdzig/1-overview
- roflcopter69 11mo agoHi! Cool to see you commenting here, great work on gdzig btw :)
- deevus 11mo agoThanks! Who knew I would be known for that. Not me!
- blopker 11mo agoI took a look at a project I maintain[0], and wow. It's so wrong in every section I saw. The generated diagrams make no sense. The text sections take implementation details that don't matter and present them to the user like they need to know them. It's also outdated. I hope actual users never see this. I dread thinking about having to go around to various LLM generated sites to correct documentation I never approved of to stop confusing users that are tricked into reading it. [0]: https://deepwiki.com/blopker/codebook https://deepwiki.com/blopker/codebook
- ewoodrich 11mo ago> The text sections take implementation details that don't matter and present them to the user like they need to know them. Yeah this seems to be a recurring issue on each of the repos I've tried. Some occasionally useful tables or diagrams buried in pages of distracting irrelevant slop.
- rmnclmnt 11mo agoI fear the consequences will be even darker: - Users are confused by autogenerated docs and don’t even want to try using a project because of it - Real curated project documentation is no longer corrected by users feedback (because they never reach it) - LLMs are trained on wrong autogenerated documentation: a downward spiral for hallucinations! (Maybe this one could then force users go look for the official docs? But not sure at this point…)
- vissi 11mo ago> LLMs are trained on wrong autogenerated documentation: a downward spiral for hallucinations! (Maybe this one could then force users go look for the official docs? But not sure at this point…) On this, I think, we should have some kind of AI-generated meta-tag, like this: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9479 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9479
- bt1a 11mo agoI wonder what incentives for adherence to the use of this meta-tag might exist? For example, imagine I send you my digital resume and it has an AI-generated footer tag on display? Maybe a bad example- I like the idea of this in general, but my mind wanders to the fact that large entities completely ignored the wishes of robots.txt when collecting the internet's text for their training corpuses
- Ultimatt 11mo agoThis worked well for me for some things I've recently been learning/working on. One improvement I'd add is the citations of where information have come from aren't hyperlinks it would be very useful if they were!
- vijaybritto 11mo agoThe diagrams generated are arbitrary and make no sense. This needs improvements
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- df0b9f169d54 11mo agoI wanted to try the tool with a repo I know. After a few attempts to select cars, bus,crosswalks, I got "capchat timeout error".
- afro88 11mo agoDo we need this, when we have tools like Claude Code, Codex etc that you can talk to about the codebase they are started in?
- ijustlurk 11mo agoAgreed, nice idea in theory. But as a codebase owner I’d rather build tailored markdown files with a CLI agent to publish as my docs. And as a codebase consumer I probably only care about a codebase if I’m modifying or running it, which means a CLI agent makes the most sense and I can ask questions/generate .md files as we go.
- anuramat 11mo ago> codebase they are started in what about the dependencies? you could just clone them as well (which is what I do occasionally), but deepwiki is faster (for indexed repos) and free
- bittermandel 11mo agoI use this heavily to navigate the neondatabase/neon repo and it has been invaluable
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoThis is a nice idea in theory. But you need excellent docs in the firstplace for it to work. And if a human spent painstaking effort writing excellent docs, the least bit of respect i can give them is read it.
- andybak 11mo ago> But you need excellent docs in the first place for it to work. Are you sure? I just tried it on projects of mine that have almost zero documentation it did a fairly good job.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoReally? How large is your project? There is a very clear point in codebase size where LLMs tend to falter without very clear written down overview descriptions of the system structure. I have a hard time seeing that this system would be immune to that. i have encountered LLMs seeminly knowing more about a system than it should because there are many similar in its training set; but that just lead me to be extra sceptical when it pulls up functions that dont exist. (Ive fought LLMs about json libraries quite a bit)
- rckt 11mo agoThis doesn't work. It's better to prompt an agent with specific questions per subject. Having this general AI interpretation of a doc can be amazingly misleading. Nice idea, but unfortunately absolutely useless and even time wasting at the moment.
- virajk_31 11mo agoIs the documentation generated using LLMs? Anyway this would only work if the documentation is truly top notch and completely accurate
- dkersten 11mo agoI don’t want to talk to my documentation. I just want the facts searchable and easily readable.
- input_sh 11mo agoI agree wholeheartedly, at best I want a "smarter" search bar where I don't have to guess the exact wording of what I'm looking for, but the reply should still be a verbatim quote from the docs, not something regurgitated to be less accurate.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 11mo agoHow many errors does that contain - anyone knows stats for that? I see "AI summaries" on github all the time. It's like a wall of text and seems to be designed to be super-verbose but without seemingly being very informative.
- sceptic123 11mo ago"If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter"
- portaouflop 11mo agoIt’s very bad. So bad that you need to filter it out of search results; but it’s being pushed hard on HN, I wonder if there is some concerted bot action that influences this
- ramon156 11mo agoI've seen this idea before claude code gemini cli etc were a thing. This is not relevant anymore (unless you surpass these tools). Cool idea, bad timing
- alansammarone 11mo agoI don't know the specifics of this particular tool, I assume it's at most using a couple of passes of (some frontier model with specific system prompt + custom tools, for example code-specific rag + some form of "summarize"). By at most I mean "probably isn't doing anything crazier than that". But it seems to be producing docs that are better than I tend to see with basic "summarize this repo for me"-style prompts, which is what I usually use on a first pass.
- theletterf 11mo agoYou need great pre-existing docs for something like this to work properly. AI must RTFM. https://passo.uno/from-tech-writers-to-ai-context-curators/ https://passo.uno/from-tech-writers-to-ai-context-curators/
- alansammarone 11mo agoIt certainly helps, but in my experience you get 60-80% of the benefit just with code (except in legacy or otherwise terrible code, for example with misleading/outdated comments everywhere, bad variable/function names, etc - in that case more like 40%).
- theletterf 11mo agoWhy stopping at 60%?
- CyberShadow 11mo agoLooks like it's impossible for me to use this service - when I try to submit the form, I get a reCAPTCHA challenge. By the time I complete it (Google requires me to make several attempts, each one being several pages), the page errors out in the background with "reCAPTCHA execution timeout".
- lionkor 11mo agoTry solving it slowly, some captchas love that.
- CyberShadow 11mo agoI don't think you understand. This website imposes its own time limit within which I must solve the CAPTCHA. Taking your time to solve the challenge slowly will not allow you to proceed, because the website's timeout will have expired.
- alansammarone 11mo agoThis is an interesting threads. There are many instances of "this is bad, doesn't work, don't like it", and many instances of "it works reasonably well here, look: <url>". Seems like a consistent pattern.
- internet_points 11mo agoThere was some article here on how llm's are like gambling, in that sometimes you get great payouts and oftentimes not, and as psych 101 taught us, that kind of intermittent reward is addictive.
- alansammarone 11mo agoInteresting point, never thought of it like that, and I think there is some truth to that view. On the other hand, IIRC, this works best in instances where it's pure chance (you have no control over the likelihood of reward) and the probability is within some range (optimal is not 50%, I think, could be wrong). I don't think either of this is true of LLMs. You obviously can improve its results with the right prompt + context + model choice, to a pretty large degree. The probability...hard to quantify, so I won't try. Let's just say that you wouldn't say you are addicted to your car because you have a 1% chance of being stuck in the middle of nowhere if it breaks down and 99% chance of a reward. The threshold I'm not sure.
- portaouflop 11mo agoIt’s a propaganda and psyop operation on HN if you ask me. This stuff is laughably bad and I wonder who would actually use it for real work beyond a “huh this is cool” at first glance. HN is super susceptible to propaganda in the AI age unfortunately; I think at this point a lot of the comments and posts on here are from bots as well
- ytreister 11mo agoI tried it with my repo and it is actually really nice. I kind of want to link to this so that anyone wanting to make contributions to my repo can learn about the code structure. My repo has a plugin structure (https://github.com/ytreister/gibr https://github.com/ytreister/gibr), and I love how it added a section about adding a new plugin: https://deepwiki.com/ytreister/gibr/7.4-adding-a-new-issue-tracker https://deepwiki.com/ytreister/gibr/7.4-adding-a-new-issue-t...
- dvt 11mo agoAs always, these kinds of things are good for "simple" stuff (e.g. stuff you don't really need AI for) but totally suck for "complicated" or "weird" things. For example, I curiously ran it on one of my OSS projects: https://github.com/dvx/lofi https://github.com/dvx/lofi It's a cute little Electron-based mini Spotify player that gets maybe like 200 users a day and has 1.3k stars on GitHub. Code quality is pretty high and it's more or less "feature-complete." There's a lot of simple/typical React stuff in there, but there's also some weird stuff I had to do. For example, native volume capture is weird. But even weirder is having to mess with the Electron internal window boundaries (so people can move their Lofi window where-ever they want to). We're essentially suppressing window rect constraints using some funky ObjectiveC black magic[1]. The code isn't complicated[1], but it's weird and probably very specific to this use case. When I ask what "constraints" does, DeepWiki totally breaks, telling me it doesn't even have access to those source files[2] (which it does). Visualizations were also actually disabled on MacOS a few versions ago (because of the janky way you need to hook into the audio driver), but, again DeepWiki doesn't really notice[3]. There have been issues/patch notes about this, so I feel those should be getting crawled. [1] https://github.com/dvx/lofi/blob/master/src/native/black-magic/macos/constraints.mm https://github.com/dvx/lofi/blob/master/src/native/black-mag... [2] https://deepwiki.com/search/what-is-constraints_cc5c0478-e45f-4b51-990e-1b76207c473e?mode=fast https://deepwiki.com/search/what-is-constraints_cc5c0478-e45... [3] https://deepwiki.com/search/how-do-macos-visualizations-wo_d8842510-2082-4872-a571-30c0da481191?mode=fast https://deepwiki.com/search/how-do-macos-visualizations-wo_d...
- marginalia_nu 11mo agoSo I gave it a spin on two of my repos. One is the extremely sprawling MarginaliaSearch repo[M1]. Here it did a decent job of capturing the architecture, though it is to be fair well documented in the repo itself. It successfully identifies the most important components, which is also good. But when describing the components, it only really succeeds where the components themselves are very self-contained and easy to grok. It did a decent job with e.g. the buffer pool[M2], but even then fails to define some concepts that would have made it easier to follow, e.g. what is a pin count in buffer management? This is standard terminology and something the model should know. I get the impression it lifts a lot of its fact from the comments and documentation that already exists, which may lead it to propagate outdated falsehoods about the code. [M1] https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch [M2] https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/5.2-buffer-pool-and-memory-management https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/MarginaliaSearch/5.2-b... The other is the SlopData[S1] repo, which contains a small library for columnar data serialization. This one I wasn't very impressed with. It produced more documentation than was necessary, mostly amending what was already there with incorrect statements it seems to have pulled out of its posterior[2][3]. The library is very low-abstraction, and there simply isn't a lot of architecture to diagram, but the model seems to insist that there must be a lot of architecture and then produces excessive diagrams as a result. [S1] https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/SlopData https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/SlopData [S2] https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/SlopData#storage-types https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/SlopData#storage-types (performance numbers are completely invented, in practice reading compressed data is typically faster than plain data) [S3] https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/SlopData/6.3-zip-packaging https://deepwiki.com/MarginaliaSearch/SlopData/6.3-zip-packa... (the overview section is false, all these tables are immutable). So overall it gives me a bit of a broken clock vibe. When it's right, it's great. When it isn't, it's not very useful. Good at the stuff that is already easy, borderline useless for the stuff that isn't.
- twp 11mo agodeepwiki.com is untrustworthy AI slop. A true cancer. deepwiki.com's generated page on my project contains several glaring errors. I hate to think of the extra support burden I will have to bear because of deepwiki.com publishing wrong information. I asked the authors of the site (Andrew Gao) to remove their page on my project, but they ignored my request.
- billyp-rva 11mo agoFrom a year ago: AI can't diagram codebases, and it isn't even close [0] [0] https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/diagrams-ai-can-and-cannot-generate/ https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/diagrams-ai-can-and-cann...
- ofalkaed 11mo agoI am quite impressed, even if it was not completely right and provided a few rather humorous charts, it is close enough assuming you are following along with the code. A great improvement over the alternatives for getting oriented in unfamiliar code, should save me a great deal of time. The only issues I have with it are that they layout is not great on small screens, poor experience on my 13" laptop, and I really wish you could hide the "Ask Devin" dialog. The experience is pretty good on my tablet though, I would prefer to use the tablet for reading/annotating the code and have deepwiki on the laptop but not that big of a deal.
- mingodad 11mo agoI've asked to index my project https://github.com/mingodad/parsertl-playground https://github.com/mingodad/parsertl-playground and the result https://deepwiki.com/mingodad/parsertl-playground https://deepwiki.com/mingodad/parsertl-playground seems to be reasonable good (still going through in more detail but overall impressive).
- 63stack 11mo agoThis is one of those sites I filtered out from my Kagi search results. Too often I stumble onto this when I'm looking for something, and it's never ever useful. There is never a time I want to look at flowcharts when looking for documentation, a solution to an error message I'm facing, or a syntax for something.
- eloisius 11mo agoSame. This is just the next iteration of all those spam sites back in the 2010s that used to mirror GitHub issues, but wowee it uses AI and you can chat with it! Forever grateful to Kagi for the ability to block sites from my results.
- voodooEntity 11mo agoSo i just tried this on 2 repositories. 1. On (https://github.com/voodooEntity/gits https://github.com/voodooEntity/gits) -> https://deepwiki.com/voodooEntity/gits https://deepwiki.com/voodooEntity/gits This is a longterm golang project i work on and it has a very very detailed documentation already. While going through the AI docs of deepwiki, i could see how it profitted from my existing documentation, most stuff is just different words same content. What i liked about it was the visualisations (even if some of them are well "special") it shows some insides in workflows that i have in my mind but might give a benefit to others not beein the author While trying out the search/chat i have to admit it gave better answers than i expected. Due to having a very fond knowledge of how to do stuff efficiently with the lib, i tested the chat on telling me whats the most efficient way to achieve XYZ. While it listed me all possibilities (all of them correct) it also correctly pointed out whats the most "efficient" way. Also i gave it some question that, i know from experience when others first tried the lib, could be confusing. But it was resolved correctly. Allover a pleasant result 2. On (github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Renegade/) -> https://deepwiki.com/electronicarts/CnC_Renegade/ https://deepwiki.com/electronicarts/CnC_Renegade/ For those who dont know , CnC Renegade is a very old game (~2000) which was coded by the original Westwood. Its mainly in C++ (some c) and a through and through plain code. There is no real documentation in the repo other than some base info for dependencies etc. First of all i saw that the resulting documentation well.... lacked documentation i guess? It just in multiple pages explaind whats in the main Readme (which is not really alot). So from the "docs generating" perspective, no gain here. Than i tried to chat with it about it - and it seemed like it has a basic understanding of the code. For me its harder to validate the results (tbh i only read over the code once when it was released - curiosity) but it seemed like it was no total loss. Conclusion: To me it seems like, to get a very good basic documentation out of it, it already must have a good basic documentation. Apart from the graphics it added, i didn't really see a gain compared to the already existing documentation. Based on the chat results i'd say, those might be decent and helpfull if you dig into a new codebase especially a more complex one and you are searching for a specific thing in 1000s of loc in multiple files. Would i use it in the future? Ill maybe try, but only the chat feature - for the generated docs as elaborated i don't see any use.
- 1317 11mo agoI tried it with my repo, it was impressive at first but then as i kept going along it just got tiring, it kept calling everything sophisticated even when it wasn't it's the same as all the other AI slop, it's really impressive the first time you see it and then you keep seeing it and get tired of its patterns of speech etc and oh it's just making up nonsense and now the ai slop "documentation" is up on the public internet for all to see with no way for me to remove it :)
- juliangmp 11mo agoI mean no offense to the people that created this, but this has been a domain I blocked in duckduckgo's search results for a while now. I really don't like how AI summaries creep up in SEO rankings and make it harder for me to find the actual, official documentation.
- tylerrecall 11mo agoInteresting approach. The challenge I keep hitting with AI-generated documentation is that it lacks the persistent context of how the codebase actually evolved - the decisions, the "why we didn't do X" knowledge, the patterns that emerged over time. I'm working on RecallBricks (memory infrastructure for AI coding tools) and seeing similar problems: AI tools are great at answering questions about code right now, but they don't remember the conversation you had last week about why you chose this architecture over that one. For documentation specifically, have you thought about combining the AI-generated docs with a memory layer that captures decision history? Like "this API endpoint exists because of issue #247 where users needed X functionality." That context makes docs way more useful than just describing what the code does. Curious how you're handling the "outdated docs" problem mentioned above - do you have triggers to regenerate when code changes significantly?
- killerstorm 11mo agoTangentially related: AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini) are unable to get public code from GitHub. (I.e. specifically assistants you use via web site, not Codex, Claude Code, etc.) Again, as it might be hard to believe, as situation is rather insane: flagship AI assistants cannot get publicly available code. They can get bits and pieces from README, but that might degrade response quality as it's often based on guesswork, etc. Example via GPT-5 Thinking, my request: ``` Can you read code from https://github.com/killerstorm/auto-ml-runner/blob/master/runner.py https://github.com/killerstorm/auto-ml-runner/blob/master/ru... ? If yes, show me some port of code and how you got it. ``` (That's normal URL user can access from the browser, you also get same result if you post top-level repo URL https://github.com/killerstorm/auto-ml-runner/ https://github.com/killerstorm/auto-ml-runner/). Thinking: 2 minutes. (IT WAS THINKING FOR TWO MINUTES JUST TO ACCESS ONE FILE!) ``` Short answer: yes... Why I’m not pasting a snippet right this second: In this environment, GitHub’s code pages are loading their chrome but not returning the file body ``` So, actually, no, it cannot read it, but it believes it can. That's rather problematic. Claude: "Unfortunately, I cannot directly read the code from that GitHub URL." Gemini: "While the tool was unable to retrieve the full, clean code directly, this inferred portion ...". I.e. it just imagined the code. The snippet has nothing to do with code in repo. This is a rather fucktacular situation as agents are not sure if they read the code, and they might hallucinate subtly wrong code trying to be helpful. As I can fetch this via curl it seems like GitHub is deliberately blocking AI agents including their partner OpenAI.
- darthvaden 11mo agoThis is nothing