[tinyhouse]

This article is a bit all over the place. First, a slide deck to describe a codebase is not that useful. There's a reason why no one ever uses a slide deck for anything besides supporting an oral presentation.

Most of these things in the post aren't new capabilities. The automation of workflows is indeed valuable and cool. Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.

[bravesoul2]

Also I don't trust it. They touched on that I think (I only skimmed).

Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable! Of course capital likes shortcuts and hacks to get the next feature out in Q3.

[imiric]

> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!

The kind of person who prefers this setup wants to read (and write) the least amount of code on their own. So their ideal workflow is one where they get to make programs through natural language. Making codebases understandable for this group is mostly a waste of effort.

It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all. Code is becoming just an intermediary artifact useless to machines, which can instead write machine code directly.

I wish someone could put this genie back in the bottle.

[DougMerritt]

> It's a wild twist of fate that programming languages were intended to make programming friendly to humans, and now humans don't want to read them at all.

Those are two different groups of humans, as you implied yourself.

[lelandbatey]

There is no amount of static material that will perfectly conform to the shape and contours of every mind that consumes that static material such that they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it.

Having a thing that is interactive and which can answer questions is a very useful thing. A slide deck that sits around for the next person is probably not that great, I agree. But if you desperately want a slide deck, then an agent like Claude which can create it on demand is pretty good. If you want summaries of changes over time, or to know "what's the overall approach at a jargon-filled but still overview level explanation of how feature/behavior X is implemented?", an agent can generate a mediocre (but probably serviceable) answer to any of those by reading the repo. That's an amazing swiss-army knife to have in your pocket.

I really used to be a hater, and I really did not trust it, but just using the thing has left me unable to deny its utility.

[bravesoul2]

The problem is if no one can describe something with words without an LLM to scour though every line of code it probably means it can't make sense to humans.

Maybe that is the idea (vibe coding ftw!) but if you want something people can understand and refine it is good to make it modular and decomposable and understandable. Then use AI to help you with the words for sure but at some level there is a human that understands the structure.

[groby_b]

> Plus you shouldn't need an LLM to understand a codebase. Just make it more understandable!

<laughs in legacy code>

And fundamentally, that isn't a function of "capital". All code bases are shaped by the implicit assumptions of their writers. If there's a fundamental mismatch or gap between reader and writer assumptions, it won't be readable.

LLMs are a way to make (some of) these implict assumptions more legible. They're not a panacea, but the idea of "just make it more understandable" is not viable. It's on par with "you don't need debuggers, just don't write bugs"

[sandos]

The number one thing I have found LLMs useful for is producing mermaidjs diagrams of code. Now, I know they are not always perfect but it has been "good enough" very many times, and I have never seen hallucinations here, only omissions. If I notice something missing its super-easy to tell it to amend.

[Uehreka]

> Not sure what AGI has anything to do with it.

Judging from the tone of the article, they’re using the term AGI in a jokey way and not taking themselves too seriously, which is refreshing.

I mean like, it wouldn’t be refreshing if the article didn’t also have useful information, but I do actually think a slide deck could be a useful way to understand a codebase. It’s exactly the kind of nice-to-have that I’d never want a junior wasting time on, but if it costs like $5 and gets me something minorly useful, that’s pretty cool.

Part of the mind-expanding transition to using LLMs involves recognizing that there are some things we used to dislike because of how much effort they took relative to their worth. But if you don’t need to do the thing yourself or burn through a team member’s time/sanity doing it, it can make you start to go “yeah fuck it, trawl the codebase and try to write a markdown document describing all of the features and requirements in a tabular format. Maybe it’ll go better than I expect, and if it doesn’t then on to something else.”