Hacker News

Codebase Explainability

by @jakevoytko

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

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