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DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

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21–30 of 55 posts

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#21
post #9

So I decided to look at some open source repos I know decently well. The only one that seems to have a wiki is LLVM ( https://deepwiki.com/llvm/llvm-project ). Thoughts on the overview page: Okay, weird subset of the top-level directories. The high-level compilation pipeline diagram is... wrong? Like, Clang-AST is definitely part of clang frontend, and you get to the optimization pipeline, which clearly fucks up the…

Yeah this is my experience too. For projects I know well, the diagrams are not engineering quality.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#22

Is deepwiki related to wikis in any way, or just grifting on the name?

Yeah, it's not a wiki at all However, in my experience, many people just know the term 'wiki' as a short form for Wikipedia - and for many, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia they know. So, I guess that the Deepwiki authors see it as some kind of deep/specialised encyclopedia.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#23
It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#24

The Elkjs project uses this and im not really sure i like it. [1] Its a bit hard to find stuff. I was looking to find the structure of the main configuration json object and couldnt find it in the deepwiki. I found it on the “non ai created” doc page of the main Elk project[2] (Elkjs is a JS implementation of Elk) But yes this is of course just one data point. [1] https://deepwiki.com/kieler/elkjs/5-usage-guide [2] h…

"Uses it" sounds strong.. I don't see any link to it from https://github.com/kieler/elkjs?

Annoyingly, anyone can just.. request a deepwiki for any GitHub repo. That one exists doesn't mean that it's endorsed or reviewed by the project.

They just kind of barged in, welcome or not. Just another SEO slop-spammer.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#26

It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

Out of curiosity, how come LibreOffice has .buckversion, BUCK, .buckconfig, etc? This commit[1] does seem to indicate using Buck to build at one point, though it is 10 years old.

[1]: https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/commit/1fd41f43eb73c373c...

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#27
post #26

It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

Out of curiosity, how come LibreOffice has .buckversion, BUCK, .buckconfig, etc? This commit[1] does seem to indicate using Buck to build at one point, though it is 10 years old. [1]: https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/commit/1fd41f43eb73c373c...

Indeed and the BUCK file was updated 2 months ago. It definitely does use BUCK. Maybe it's not the main build system, but it's not hard to see why someone or something unfamiliar with the project would think that.

Really there should be a comment in the BUCK file explaining what it is.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#28
I hesitate to dump on Deepwiki, because what it does is to some degree impressive and timesaving (especially the system diagrams).

But for my libs (that aren't super popular, but OTOH have a few million downloads per year) it generates documentation that is incorrect, and this is not good for users.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#29
post #14

Isn’t this supposed to be a short technical blog? Why does it seem like they’re a salesman and it’s a sales pitch? > "We are generating more code than ever. With LLMs like Claude already writing most of Anthropic’s code, the challenge is no longer producing code, it is understanding it." The first sentence already is obviously AI generated, and reading through it it, it is obviously completely written by AI to the po…

Though I agree with you, both of the sentences you cited (the first two in the piece) have mistakes in their English and wouldn’t be written by AI.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#30
post #26

It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

Out of curiosity, how come LibreOffice has .buckversion, BUCK, .buckconfig, etc? This commit[1] does seem to indicate using Buck to build at one point, though it is 10 years old. [1]: https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/commit/1fd41f43eb73c373c...

It seems like it uses Make to build the main thing and then Buck is used to publish Java API to Maven Central, rather than building. Which is kind of a side thing, I guess code organization wise it would be better if Buck was not included on the root level? But Buck requires it? Although not a huge deal, but explains at least how LLM thought it was equivalent in importance.
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