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I would find this more interesting if it made tutorials out if the Linux, LLVM, OpenZFS and FreeBSD codebases.
The Linux repository has ~50M tokens, which goes beyond the 1M token limit for Gemini 2.5 Pro. I think there are two paths forward: (1) decompose the repository into smaller parts (e.g., kernel, shell, file system, etc.), or (2) wait for larger-context models with a 50M+ input limit.
It seems a trifle... overexcited at times.
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Their site seems to be down. I can't find their results.
Were they acquired? Or did they give up and the CEO found work at Google? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42542512 The latter is what this thread claims ^
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Useful documentation explains why the code does what it does. Ie. why is this code there? An LLM can't magically figure out your motivation behind doing something a certain way.
Are you implying that only the creator of the code can write documentation?
Frankly, most documentation is useless fluff. LLMs will be able to write a ton of that for sure :-)
You built in in one afternoon? I need to figure out these mythical abilities.
I've thought about this idea few weeks back but could not figure out how to implement it.
Amazing job OP
* Previously, it was simply infeasible for most codebases to get a decent tutorial for one reason or another. E.g. the codebase is someone's side project and they don't have the time or energy to maintain docs, let alone a tutorial, which is widely regarded as one of the most labor-intensive types of docs.
* It's always been hard to persuade businesses to hire more technical writers because it's perenially hard to connect our work to the bottom or top line.
* We may actually see more demand for technical writers because it's now more feasible (and expected) for software projects of all types to have decent docs. The key future skill would be knowing how to orchestrate ML tools to produce (and update) docs.
(But I'm also under no delusion: it definitely possible for TWs to go the way of the dodo bird and animatronics professionals.)
I think I have a very good way to evaluate this "turn GitHub codebases into easy tutorials" tool but it'll take me a few days to write up. I'll post my first impressions to https://technicalwriting.dev
P.S. there has been a flurry of recent YC startups focused on automating docs. I think it's a tough space. The market is very fragmented. Because docs are such a widespread and common need I imagine that a lot of the best practices will get commoditized and open sourced (exactly like Pocket Flow is doing here)
Thanks buddy! this will be very helpful !!
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 dummies". Spending paragraphs to explain what an API is through restaurant analogies is a little unnecessary. And then followed up with more paragraphs on what GraphQL is. Every chapter seems to suffer from this. The generated documentation seems mor…
It sounds like the tool (as it's currently set up) may not actually be that effective at writing tutorial-style content in particular. Tutorials [1] are usually heavily action-oriented and take you from a specific start point to a specific end point to help you get hands-on experience in some skill. Some technical writers argue that there should be no theory whatsoever in tutorials. However, it's probably easy to tweak the prompts to get more action-oriented content with less conceptual explanation (and exclamation marks).
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The example you made has, in fact, a documentation https://docs.browser-use.com/introduction
You don't point this tool at the documentation though. You point it at a repo. Granted, this example (and others) have plenty of inline documentation. And, public documentation is likely in the training data for LLMs. But, this is more than just a prompt. The tool generates really nicely structured and readable tutorials that let you understand codebases at a conceptual level easier than reading docstrings and code.…