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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

#41

Post by achierius »

zh2408 wrote: post #11
ryao wrote: post #9

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.

Some huge percentage of that is just drivers. The kernel is likely what would be of interest to someone in this regard; moreover, much of that is architecture specific. IIRC the x86 kernel is <1M lines, though probably not <1M tokens.

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

#42

Post by murkt »

relativ575 wrote: post #40
croes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, kudos to the author because AI didn’t came up with that. But that’s what they sell, that AI could do what the author did with AI. The question is, is it worth to put all that money and energy in AI. MS sacrificed its CO2 goals for email summaries and better autocomplete not to mention all the useless things we do with AI

> But that’s what they sell, that AI could do what the author did with AI. Can you give an example of what you meant here? The author did use AI. What does "AI coming up with that" mean?

GP commenter complains that it’s not AI that came up with an idea and implemented it, but a human did.

In the few years we will see complaints that it’s not AI that built a power station and a datacenter, so it doesn’t count as well.

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

#44

Post by gregpr07 »

I built browser use. Dayum, the results for our lib are really impressive, you didn’t touch outputs at all? One problem we have is maintaining the docs with current codebase (code examples break sometimes). Wonder if I could use parts of Pocket to help with that.

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

#45

Post by cehrlich »

gregpr07 wrote: post #44

I built browser use. Dayum, the results for our lib are really impressive, you didn’t touch outputs at all? One problem we have is maintaining the docs with current codebase (code examples break sometimes). Wonder if I could use parts of Pocket to help with that.

As a maintainer of a different library, I think there’s something here. A revised version of this tool that also gets fed the docs and asked to find inaccuracies could be great. Even if false positives and false negatives are let’s say 20% each, it would still be better than before as final decisions are made by a human.

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

#48

Post by croes »

relativ575 wrote: post #40
croes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, kudos to the author because AI didn’t came up with that. But that’s what they sell, that AI could do what the author did with AI. The question is, is it worth to put all that money and energy in AI. MS sacrificed its CO2 goals for email summaries and better autocomplete not to mention all the useless things we do with AI

> But that’s what they sell, that AI could do what the author did with AI. Can you give an example of what you meant here? The author did use AI. What does "AI coming up with that" mean?

It’s about the AI hype.

The AI companies sell it like the AI could do it by itself and developers are obsolete but in reality it‘s a tool that still needs developers to make something useful

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

#49

Post by croes »

murkt wrote: post #42
relativ575 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that’s what they sell, that AI could do what the author did with AI. Can you give an example of what you meant here? The author did use AI. What does "AI coming up with that" mean?

GP commenter complains that it’s not AI that came up with an idea and implemented it, but a human did. In the few years we will see complaints that it’s not AI that built a power station and a datacenter, so it doesn’t count as well.

Some people already said it’s useless to learn to program because AI will do, that‘s the hype of AI not that AI isn’t useful as such like parent comment suggested.

They push AI into everything like it’s the ultimate solution but it is not instead is has serious limitations.

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

#50

Post by trcf21 »

hackernewds wrote: post #36
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…

exactly it is. I'd rather impressive but at the same time the audience is always going to be engineers, so perhaps it can be curated to still be technical to a degree? I can't imagine a scenario where I have to explain to the VP my ETL pipeline

From flow.py

Ensure the tone is welcoming and easy for a newcomer to understand{tone_note}.

- Output only the Markdown content for this chapter.

Now, directly provide a super beginner-friendly Markdown output (DON'T need ```markdown``` tags)

So just a change here might do the trick if you’re interested.

But I wonder how Gemini would manage different levels. From my take (mostly edtech and not in English) it’s really hard to tone the answer properly and not just have a black and white (5 year old vs expert talk) answer. Anyone has advice on that?

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