[simonw]

We hit "can actually be useful answering questions about it" within the last ~6 months with the introduction of "reasoning" models with 100,000+ token contest limits (and the aforementioned Gemini 1 million/2 million models).

The "reasoning" thing is important because it gives models the ability to follow execution flow and answer complex questions that down many different files and classes. I'm finding it incredible for debugging, eg: https://gist.github.com/simonw/03776d9f80534aa8e5348580dc6a8...

I built a files-to-prompt tool to help dump entire codebases into the larger models and I use it to answer complex questions about code (including other people's projects written in languages I don't know) several times a week. There's a bunch of examples of that here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?q=Files-to-prompt&sort=dat...