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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 jus
by jakevoytko 3mo ago
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
- herval 3mo agoAny 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.
- jakevoytko 3mo agoAt the moment I'd check the sibling comment, which has a few links!
- ebcode 3mo agohttps://wettel.github.io/codecity.html https://wettel.github.io/codecity.html
- DANmode 3mo agoForgive me if this is naive, I haven’t been in DevOps my whole career: doesn’t > very few people on the team are managing to keep up with it mean a monorepo is a mistake worth unwinding immediately?
- boron1006 3mo agoI posted about my project below - https://github.com/0x007BA7/codebook https://github.com/0x007BA7/codebook But maybe you should checkout the tools it’s based on, sem - https://github.com/Ataraxy-Labs/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.
- jakevoytko 3mo agoThis is great stuff; I've been prototyping with a few language-specific parsers like the Golang and the polyglot approach looks really helpful for me
- boron1006 3mo agoYeah I hope the links are helpful