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Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

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Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#161
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental (a frontier model) has 5 RPM and 25 RPD. Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview 04-17 another powerful model has 10 and 500. OpenAI also allows you to use their API for free if you agree to share the tokens.

What are "RPM" and "RPD"? I assume not Revolutions Per Minute?

Requests

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Answers like this are sort of what makes me wonder what most engineers are smoking when they think AI isn’t valuable. Honestly, I wonder if I'm living in some parallel universe, because my experience is that "most engineers" are far from that position. The reactions I'm seeing are either "AI is the future" or "I have serious objections to and/or problems with AI". If you're calling the latter group "the outright di…

The value is that it got the details correct as you admit. That alone is worth the price of admission. Even if I need to rewrite or edit parts it has saved me time, and has raised the quality of PRs being submitted across the board. The key point with these tools is *Accountability*. As an engineer you are still accountable for your work. Using any tool doesn't take that away. If the PR tool gets it wrong, and you st…

Are you accountable for CPU bugs in new machines added to your Kubernetes fleet? The trusting-trust problem only works if there is someone to trust.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#163
As an extension to this general idea: AI generated interactive tutorials for software usage might be a good product. Assuming it was trained on the defined usage paths present in the code, it would be able to guide the user through those usages.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#165
post #156
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need such fancy examples. There are plenty of codebases where people are working with code that is over a decade old and has several paradigms all intermixed with a lot of tribal knowledge that isn't documented in code or wiki. That is where AI sucks. It will not be able to make meaningfully change in that environment. There is also the frontend and tnpse code bases don't need to be very old at all bef…

When is the last time you tried using LLMs against a large, old, crufty undocumented codebase? Things have changed a lot in the past six weeks. Gemini 2.5 Pro accepts a million tokens and can "reason" with them, which means you can feed it hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it has a surprisingly good chance of figuring things out. OpenAI released their first million token models with the GPT 4.1 series. OpenA…

Ultimately LLMs don’t really understand what the code does at runtime. Sure, just parsing out the codebase can help make a good guess but in some cases it’s hard to trust LLMs with changes because the consequences are unknown in complex codebases that have weird warts nobody documented.

Maybe in a generation or two codebases will become more uniform and predictible if fewer humans do it by hand. Same with self driving cars, if there were no human drivers out there the problem would become trivial to conquer.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#166
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is the last time you tried using LLMs against a large, old, crufty undocumented codebase? Things have changed a lot in the past six weeks. Gemini 2.5 Pro accepts a million tokens and can "reason" with them, which means you can feed it hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it has a surprisingly good chance of figuring things out. OpenAI released their first million token models with the GPT 4.1 series. OpenA…

Ultimately LLMs don’t really understand what the code does at runtime. Sure, just parsing out the codebase can help make a good guess but in some cases it’s hard to trust LLMs with changes because the consequences are unknown in complex codebases that have weird warts nobody documented. Maybe in a generation or two codebases will become more uniform and predictible if fewer humans do it by hand. Same with self drivin…

That's a lot less true today than it was six weeks ago. The "reasoning" models are spookily good at answering questions about how code runs, and identifying the source of bugs.

They still make mistakes, and yeah they're still (mostly) next token predicting machines under the hood, but if your mental model is "they can't actually predict through how some code will execute" you may need to update that.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#167

Very cool, thanks for sharing. I imagine that this will make a lot of my fellow technical writers (even more) nervous about the future of our industry. I think the reality is more along the lines of: * 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…

Here's my write-up: https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/pocketflow/index.html

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#168
post #156
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need such fancy examples. There are plenty of codebases where people are working with code that is over a decade old and has several paradigms all intermixed with a lot of tribal knowledge that isn't documented in code or wiki. That is where AI sucks. It will not be able to make meaningfully change in that environment. There is also the frontend and tnpse code bases don't need to be very old at all bef…

When is the last time you tried using LLMs against a large, old, crufty undocumented codebase? Things have changed a lot in the past six weeks. Gemini 2.5 Pro accepts a million tokens and can "reason" with them, which means you can feed it hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it has a surprisingly good chance of figuring things out. OpenAI released their first million token models with the GPT 4.1 series. OpenA…

Gemini 2.5 Pro crashes with a 50) status code every 5 requests. Not great for a model you're supposed to rely on.

Re: Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

#169
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I’m not saying that the tool is useless, I was confuting your argument about being a project WITHOUT docs. LLM can write passable docs, but obviously can write better docs of project well documented in training data. And this example is probably in training data as of April 2025

For what it's worth, I have tried it on a couple of private repos today and the quality is incredible. Give it a shot.

I think Gemini 2.5 Pro is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. I have tried this sort of thing before (documentation, not tutorials, granted) and it wasn't anywhere near this good.

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