I, and I'm guessing most people, don't have a use case that warrants a subscription for such a service let alone one that costs $20/month.
Happy to pay a one time fee and the ability to use my local LLM
Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#52I, and I'm guessing most people, don't have a use case that warrants a subscription for such a service let alone one that costs $20/month. Happy to pay a one time fee and the ability to use my local LLM
If something increases productivity 1% and costs $20 it's already easily worth it for most professional software developers.
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#53Congratulations on the launch - this looks great and I've been waiting for years for something like this! As a researcher who mostly uses Python, and explores/navigates a large number of repos for a short time, often written by other researchers not necessarily trained in software best practices, I was always frustrated (and surprised) that there was no VS Code extension or tool that gave me a quick overview/visualiz…
Re: Edit The top level categorizations are indeed fixed, however the nodes themselves can be arbitrary. We've found this helps with grouping and organization while still allowing for the flexibility required to accommodate different systems. I'm curious, are there any categories missing here that could be added? Currently, we categorize by: Frontend (UI/UX elements), Backend (API/Business/Data Access), DB(persisting…
I don’t think I’d draw a diagram by hand with an explicit “frontend” label, I think I’d most likely leave it without a label. If I had to choose I would leave it labeled as “UI”.
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#54Twice the monthly cost of Copilot seems crazy to me, and I’m nowhere near as subscription-hostile as most folks here.
I get where you're coming from - Copilot is very cheap and useful! We want the free version of CodeViz to be as useful as possible for you. Some features, like the second architecture layer, are just expensive for us. Personally, I spend a small fraction of my time actually typing code and much more time gathering context & building a mental map. CodeViz speeds up the mental map part, so we hope to deliver much more…
Interesting point! You’ve convinced me that something like this done well could actually be more valuable than code generation.
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#55Seems like there is a lot of potential here, although a hard sell up against the licensing fees of products from e.g. Jetbrains. I’m sure yours will be better at its one thing than a more generalised product but it’s a tough market. Compared to what specialised engineering software costs (see Solidworks) it is cheap, but we are very stingy in software.
On a different note: I’m wondering, do you have any function calling built in? Is there room for combining LLM output with LSP calls?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#56I personally don’t like VS Code although if this works well I might open it just for this feature. I’d still be coding and taking notes in emacs though. Any thoughts on putting most of the smarts into a server process so that any editor can have a plug-in that talks to it?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#57Does my codebase leave my machine when using your extension with it?
Yes, some code is sent to Anthropic. We're hoping to: find initial users that are comfortable with software copilots (github copilot, cursor, etc) -> iterate on their feedback to make diagram generation require less sophisticated LLMs -> move everything locally
This will be a no go for more and more large companies.
We just had a major incident because someone accidentally uploaded our codebase via a VS code extension, lawyers, everything involved. I expect that non local AI tools will be banned soon.
Think about it, what 3rd party tool would you let scrape your whole codebase and send it to their server?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#58Does it show dead code? Like classes which are not being used by anything and are safe to delete?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#59I am surprised there is no word "privacy" in this page, as of this comment!
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#60I personally don’t like VS Code although if this works well I might open it just for this feature. I’d still be coding and taking notes in emacs though. Any thoughts on putting most of the smarts into a server process so that any editor can have a plug-in that talks to it?
Definitely an interesting thought, although we wouldn't be able to support any UI/UX. We could host a separate utility and expose endpoints for UML or markdown though.