Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge

Dev tools

documentation generator

SHOW HN2025

923points
172comments
#20of 3,837 in 2025
Top 1%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

DebatedReal support and real criticism

33 positive, 30 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 26 critical, out of 91 comments about the project. Thread score +0.12.

Idea: 9 for, 7 againstExecution: 7 for, 8 againstDocs: 3 for, 6 againstDesign: 3 for, 3 againstPerformance: 0 for, 2 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for understanding unfamiliar codebases and onboarding

    From 3 comments
    • That's a game changer for a new Open source contributor's onboarding. Put in postgres or redis codebase, get a good understanding and get going to contribute.
      wg0 on HN
    • Really nice work and thank you for sharing. These are great demonstrations of the value of LLMs which help to go against the negative view on the impacts to junior engineers.…
      zarkenfrood on HN
    • This is really cool and very practical. definitely will try it out for some projects soon. Can see some finetuning after generation being required, but assuming you know your own…
      mvATM99 on HN
  • Impressive output quality

    From 2 comments
    • I built browser use. Dayum, the results for our lib are really impressive, you didn’t touch outputs at all? One problem we have is maintaining the docs with current codebase…
      gregpr07 on HN
    • I had not used gemini before, so spent a fair bit of time yak shaving to get access to the right APIs and set up my Google project. (I have an OpenAPI key but it wasn't clear how…
      mooreds on HN

Objections

  • Output tone is overly simplistic or overexcited

    From 3 comments
    • This is actually really cool. I just tried it out using an AI studio API key and was pretty impressed. One issue I noticed was that the output was a little too much "for…
      bilalq on HN
    • The overview diagrams it creates are pretty interesting, but the tone/style of the AI-generated text is insufferable to me - e.g.…
      Retr0id on HN
    • Is there a way to limit the number of exclamation marks in the output? It seems a trifle... overexcited at times.
      andybak on HN
  • Generated docs don't replace human documentation

    From 1 comment
    • This is nice and fun for getting some fast indications on an unknown codebase, but, as others said here and elsewhere, it doesn't replace human-made documentation.…
      remoquete on HN
  • Possible factual errors in generated code examples

    From 1 comment
    • This is neat, but I did find an error in the output pretty quickly. (Disregard the mangled indentation) ``` # Use the Session as a context manager with requests.Session() as s:…
      istjohn on HN

Requests

  • Adjustable tone or style template

    From 1 comment
    • I love it! I effectively achieve similar results by asking Cursor lots of questions! Like at least one other person in the comments mentioned, I would like a slightly different…
      manofmanysmiles on HN
  • Support for larger codebases beyond context limits

    From 2 comments
    • I would find this more interesting if it made tutorials out if the Linux, LLVM, OpenZFS and FreeBSD codebases.
      ryao on HN
    • This is super cool! I attempted to use this on a project and kept running into "This model's maximum context length is 200000 tokens. However, your messages resulted in 459974…
      nitinram on HN

Questions

  • How much does it cost to run

    From 1 comment
    • Did you measure how much it cost to run it against your examples? Trying to gauge how much it would cost to run this against my repos.
      potamic on HN
  • Can it use private repositories

    From 1 comment
    • Is there an easy way to have this visit a private repository? I've got a new codebase to learn and it's behind credentials.
      polishdude20 on HN

Alternatives named

  • Cursor or Claude Code prompting for docs

    From 2 comments
    • I love it! I effectively achieve similar results by asking Cursor lots of questions! Like at least one other person in the comments mentioned, I would like a slightly different…
      manofmanysmiles on HN
    • Woah, this is really neat. My first step for many new libraries is to clone the repo, launch Claude code, and ask it to write good documentation for me. This would save a lot of…
      TheTaytay on HN
  • Mutable AI

    From 1 comment
    • A company (mutable ai) was acquired by Google last year for essentially doing this but outputting a wiki instead of a tutorial.
      chairhairair on HN
  • gitdiagram

    From 1 comment
    • I was using gitdiagram but llms are very bad at generating good error free mermaid code! Thanks buddy! this will be very helpful !!
      bdg001 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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