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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

#71
post #12

The overview diagrams it creates are pretty interesting, but the tone/style of the AI-generated text is insufferable to me - e.g. https://the-pocket.github.io/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/Req...

mind explaining what exactly was insufferable here?

If you don't feel the same way from reading it, I'm not sure it can be explained.

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

#72
post #59

Did you measure how much it cost to run it against your examples? Trying to gauge how much it would cost to run this against my repos.

Looks like there are 4 prompts and the last one can run up to 10 times for the chapter content.

You might get two or three tutorials built for yourself inside the free 25/day limit, depending on how many chapters it needs.

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

#73
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 good answers about its purpose and implementation from a completely cold read is very impressive.

Even if the LLM never writes a line of code - this is still valuable, because helping humans understand software faster means you can help humans write software faster.

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

#75

I hate this language: "built an AI", did you train a new model to do this? Or are you in fact calling ChatGPT 4o, or Sonnet 3.7 with some specific prompts? If you trained a model from scratch to do this I would say you "built an AI", but if you're just calling existing models in a loop then you didn't build an AI. You just wrote some prompts and loops and did some RAG. Which isn't building an AI and isn't particularl…

> “I built an AI”

> look inside

> it’s a ChatGPT wrapper

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

#76

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.

Thank you! And correct, I didn't modify the outputs. For small changes, you can just feed the commit history and ask an LLM to modify the docs. If there are lots of architecture-level changes, it would be easier to just feed the old docs and rewrite - it usually takes <10 minutes.

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

#77
post #51

Does it use the docs in the repository or only the code?

By default we use both based on regex:

DEFAULT_INCLUDE_PATTERNS = { ".py", ".js", ".jsx", ".ts", ".tsx", ".go", ".java", ".pyi", ".pyx", ".c", ".cc", ".cpp", ".h", ".md", ".rst", "Dockerfile", "Makefile", ".yaml", ".yml", } DEFAULT_EXCLUDE_PATTERNS = { "test", "tests/", "docs/", "examples/", "v1/", "dist/", "build/", "experimental/", "deprecated/", "legacy/", ".git/", ".github/", ".next/", ".vscode/", "obj/", "bin/", "node_modules/", ".log" }

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

#78
post #56

Interesting..would you like to share some technical details? it did not seem you have used RAG here?

Yeah, RAG is not the best option here. Check out the design doc: https://github.com/The-Pocket/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/bl... I also have a YouTube Dev Tutorial. The link is on the repo.

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

#79
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ^

I don’t know the details of the deal, but their YC profile indicates they were acquired.
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