- This is an interesting approach. I think, in a way, it mirrors what I do. Having contracted for much of my career, I’ve had to get up to speed on a number of codebases quickly. When I have a choice of how to do this, I find a recently closed issue and try to write a unit test for it. If nothing else, you learn where the tests live, assuming they exist, and how much of a safety net you have if you start hacking away at things. Once I know how to add tests and run them (which is a really good way to deal with the codebase setup problem mentioned in the article because a lot of onboarding docs only get you to the codebase running without all the plumbing you need), I feel like I can get by without a full understanding of the code as I can throw in a couple of tests to prove what I want to get to and then hope the tests or CI or hooks prevent me from doing A Bad Thing. Not perfect and it varies depending on on how well the project is built and maintained, but if I can break things easily, people are probably used to things breaking and then I have an avenue to my first meaningful contribution. Making things break less.
by its-kostya
0 subcomment
- I am quite skeptical and reserved when it comes to AI, particularly as it relates to impacts of the next generation of engineers. But using AI to learn a code base has been life-changing. Using a crutch to feel your way around. Then ditching the crutch when things are familiar, like using a map until you learn the road yourself.
- Is this similar to what you can get with Doxygen?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxygen#/media/File:Doxygen-1....
- Doesn’t anyone use debuggers anymore?
When I have a codebase I dont know or didn’t touch in some time and there’s a bug, first step is reproduce it an then set a breakpoint early on somewhere, crab some coffee and spend some time to step through it looking at state until I know what’s happening and from there its usually kind of obvious.
Why would one need a graph view to learn a codebase when you can just slap a red dot next to the route and step a few times?
by hyperific
1 subcomments
- GitHub Next comes to mind
https://githubnext.com/projects/repo-visualization/
- Your visualizer looks great! I really like that it queues up tasks to run instead of only operating on the code during runtime attachment. I haven't seen that kind of thing before.
I built my own node graph utility to do this for my code, after using Unreal's blueprints for the first time. Once it clicked for me that the two are different views of the same codebase, I was in love. It's so much easier for me to reason about node graphs, and so much easier for me to write code as plain text (with an IDE/language server). I share your wish that there were a more general utility for it, so I could use it for languages other than js/ts.
Anyway, great job on this!
- Very cool! For all its faults, seeing control and value change flows through execution is one of the things I really liked about Unreal's Blueprint viz scripting system. This looks like a better take on that.
And for huge git repos I always like to generate a Gource animation to understand how the repo grew, when big rearrangements and refactors happened, what the most active parts of the codebase are, etc.
- The building of the visualiser was less interesting to me than the result and your conclusion. I agree that finding new ways to ingest the structure and logic of software would be very useful, and I like your solution. Is there a way to test it out?
- In reverse engineering we often use Graph View to see execution flow as well. Glad to see it being used elsewhere
- I always thought to do this visualization in 3d and maybe with VR. Not sure how useful or pleasing experience it would be. Kudos to the author of the project to get this done!
- Do you guys remember the smalltalk toolkit posted here a while ago which their creators made specifically for help understanding new codebases?
- This is the first thing that I used LLMs on. Not code generation, but parser and tooling to gain understanding. Also saves resources in the long run.
by luxurytent
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- This may be where AI coding tools unlock us. Being able to build tooling against novel concepts that change how we approach reading and writing code. I like it!
- A use case that interests me is dynamic visualization for debugging, when there are interacting systems.
by satheeshds
2 subcomments
- - But I'll admit, this isn't precisely how I would do it today
How would you do it today?
by hxugufjfjf
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- Cool project! Would you be willing to share the source code?
- You are so lucky to have git history and issues to work from!
- Where's the visualizer the blog post talks about?
How is it different from regular code browser/indexers?
by indiekitai
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by nimbus-hn-test
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by nimbus-hn-test
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