Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Releases CodeWiki

codewiki.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 45 posts

Re: Google Releases CodeWiki

#2

Post by oshams »

Hello HN,

We previously launched Auto Wiki (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915999) in Jan 2024 and broke the ground for AI generated wikis that explain your code. Now this product has been rebuilt by the same team, as well as others and launched as a part of Google. Hope you enjoy.

Although, I've recently moved on to working on Gemini and AI research, I'm still involved as an advisor and founder emeritus of sorts. This team moves extremely fast and while we don't have full availability yet, we're working hard on addressing some early feedback before we make it more widely available including for private repos. Personally, I think the NotebookLM integration is a nice touch and distinguishing factor that we could only do as Google.

I hope you enjoy.

Thank You, Omar (Formerly Founder/CEO MutableAI)

Re: Google Releases CodeWiki

#5

Post by quamserena »

I don’t understand how this can be more optimal than just reading the documentation that a human already wrote. All “normal” uses can be answered by reading the docs, everything advanced you can just read the code. I’m not sure when I would ever use this?

Re: Google Releases CodeWiki

#6

Post by dpark »

quamserena wrote: post #5

I don’t understand how this can be more optimal than just reading the documentation that a human already wrote. All “normal” uses can be answered by reading the docs, everything advanced you can just read the code. I’m not sure when I would ever use this?

Generating and maintaining docs is a massive cost. Presumably the point of this is to reduce that cost. And for projects where the existing documentation is poor or nonexistent, this might be far better than what’s available today.

How well this actually works, though, I have no idea.

Re: Google Releases CodeWiki

#8

Post by e28eta »

If this is being regenerated every commit, I’d be interested to see the version history and/or being able to see the CodeWiki diff inside a pull request.

Maybe it’s too noisy, if the LLM isn’t stable about the way it’s wording things, or maybe it’s only useful for commits that make significant changes to architecture. However, I do think it’d be interesting to see how the documentation changes over time, as well as seeing how any specific PR changes it.

Also, I looked at golang, and I was definitely expecting a multi-page architecture with lots of cross references, not just one long scrolling field of content.

Re: Google Releases CodeWiki

#9

Post by sidcool »

quamserena wrote: post #5

I don’t understand how this can be more optimal than just reading the documentation that a human already wrote. All “normal” uses can be answered by reading the docs, everything advanced you can just read the code. I’m not sure when I would ever use this?

Reading a ton of docs and interpreting them is a tedious activity. If you can get deducible or inferable answers with AI, that's a huge win. I have faced issues with kubernetes that needed me to wade through the code for days to find it was a missed case or unsupported. AI would help me in minutes. That's the claim here, if it works that way.

Re: Google Releases CodeWiki

#10

Post by mannanj »

oshams wrote: post #2

Hello HN, We previously launched Auto Wiki ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915999 ) in Jan 2024 and broke the ground for AI generated wikis that explain your code. Now this product has been rebuilt by the same team, as well as others and launched as a part of Google. Hope you enjoy. Although, I've recently moved on to working on Gemini and AI research, I'm still involved as an advisor and founder emeritus of…

Ok so it was acquired and merged into that google offering? Does this mean we lost the open source nature and ability to preserve and protect our data?
Post reply on HN