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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

#171

Post by simonw »

LunaSea wrote: post #168
simonw wrote: 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…

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

Yeah, there's a reason it still has "preview" and "experimental" in the model names.

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

#173

Post by neop1x »

bilalq wrote: post #34

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…

>> This can probably be mitigated by refining the prompt

Sometimes it explains things like I am a child and sometimes it doesn't explain things well enough. I think fixing this just by a simple prompt change won't work - it may fix it in one part and make things worse in the other part. This is a problem which I have with LLM: you can fine-tune the prompt for a specific case but I find it difficult to write a universally-working prompt. The problem seems to be LLM "does not understand my intents", like it can't deduce what I need and "proactively" help. It follows requirements from the prompt but the prompt has to (and can't) handle all situations. I am getting tired of LLM.

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

grugagag wrote: post #165
simonw wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by nitinram »

polishdude20 wrote: post #114

Is there an easy way to have this visit a private repository? I've got a new codebase to learn and it's behind credentials.

You can also use it by using the --dir flag once you clone the repository. It can work from a local directory.

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

#176

Post by nitinram »

This is super cool! I attempted to use this on a project and kept running into "This model's maximum context length is 200000 tokens. However, your messages resulted in 459974 tokens. Please reduce the length of the messages." I used open ai o4-mini. Is there an easy way to handle this gracefully? Basically if you had thoughts on how to make some tutorials for really large codebases or project directories?

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

#177

Post by zh2408 »

nitinram wrote: post #176

This is super cool! I attempted to use this on a project and kept running into "This model's maximum context length is 200000 tokens. However, your messages resulted in 459974 tokens. Please reduce the length of the messages." I used open ai o4-mini. Is there an easy way to handle this gracefully? Basically if you had thoughts on how to make some tutorials for really large codebases or project directories?

Could you try to use gemini 2.5 pro? It's free every day for first 25 requests, and can handle 1M input tokens

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

#178

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

cushychicken wrote: post #73
bilalq wrote: post #34

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…

Answers like this are sort of what makes me wonder what most engineers are smoking when they think AI isn’t valuable. I don’t think the outright dismissal of AI is smart. (And, OP, I don’t mean to imply that you are doing that. I mean this generally.) I also suspect people who level these criticisms have never really used a frontier LLM. Feeding in a whole codebase that I’m familiar with, and hearing the LLM give goo…

Summarization is one thing LLM's can do well, yes. (That's not what this current hype cycle is selling though.)

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

#179

Post by iamsaitam »

BLOATED. This project is 100 lines of code, but everything that is non-code related is bloated like a gas giant. All the text and videos are written by an LLM. The author would learn from understanding that QUANTITY isn't QUALITY, toning down the verbiage would benefit greatly what they are trying to communicate.

PS: The generated "design documents" are 2k+ lines long. This seems like a great way to exceed quotas.

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

#180

Post by teknico »

kaycebasques wrote: post #167
kaycebasques wrote: post #126

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

Thank you, very detailed and useful.
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