Very cool. Have built something like this in the past - let me know if you are hiring.
Curious to learn more about the project, what were you working on? We're not hiring at the moment, but let's stay in touch!
Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
61–70 of 90 posts
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
That makes sense, we'll make this change!
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#63Seems 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 call…
Glad you see the potential! We do have an existing function "call graph" view that uses traditional static analysis methods with LSP calls. Augmenting this view with LLMs seems very promising, and we are very much headed in that direction! Are there use cases you can see this being helpful for?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#64Does it show dead code? Like classes which are not being used by anything and are safe to delete?
The call graph doesn't highlight dead code specifically, but unused blocks are manually identifiable through isolated/broken chains. Is this something you'd like to see?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#65Congratulations 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…
I like this perspective. I am just starting to dip my toes into software development and one thing I love about the industry as a whole is that it allows for and often encourages new ways of doing a thing, which in turn promotes new ways of thinking about thing. So many industries I interact with are stuck in a "that's the way it's always been done" loop and it is maddening, sometimes.
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#66I, 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
Thanks for the feedback! A fully local stack would give control back to developers, which we would love to do once open source model performance improves. Hoping we can change your mind on the value of navigating and editing code with visual diagrams, it's quite a bit easier!
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Makes total sense, and sorry to hear about the incident. At the moment, closed source models are the only viable way to generate high quality diagrams. Once that changes, we'd prefer to switch to open source too for many of the reasons you mentioned.
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#68Diagrams of code can be done with UML ¹. A fairly decent ² standard with a set of different diagrams that can be created to visualize code. In those terms CodeViz will provide a form of simplified class diagrams and a function call mapping? Will there be sequence diagrams in the future? ¹ https://www.uml.org/ ² It has fallen out of fashion, since many people found it too heavy, and a lot of people have hever heard of…
Yes, we'd like to introduce more standard rules and visual notations as provided by UML. Did you get a chance to try the call graph? It contains functions and classes in one view. We're going to give the user control over the call graph's scope (whether to show functions, classes, files, etc), which would be closer to simplified class diagrams/function call mapping. The info in sequence diagrams is useful - maybe we…
Hi Liam - can't seem to see a call graph. I've sent a report, but wasn't sure what to expect, as your site has a nice preview of the architectuer graph, but not the call graph functionality. Perhaps add a second preview? $19 does seem a little steep. Would it be possible to have a lower cost with a user supplied 3rd party LLM service key?
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#69Could be useful for me. Will keep an eye on this.
Re: Launch HN: CodeViz (YC S24) – Visual maps of your codebase in VS Code
#70Since you are asking for feedback, I would seriously consider buying licenses for my team if:
- We are allowed to use our own API key to get your extension to talk directly with our LLM of choice. I understand you are using Claude right now, but we are on OpenAI & Copilot; since we already went through the hoops of "accepting that our codebase will be sent to an LLM", we are trying to control the level of exposure. OpenAI is already in, Claude isn't; and you definitely won't be so having our codebase go through your infra is a no go. Local LLM would be incredible, but it might be not technically achievable yet.
- The price is too steep. I get way more value out of Copilot than I get from CodeViz which is similarly priced. I understand you have LLM costs at the moment, but as the point above defends: it does not have to be that way. I would find it way more "fair" to have to insert my LLM API (even for the free version and/or trial, right now you are loosing money on that) and have a separate cost for the extension; possibly with a "lifelong for current version + 1 year of upgrade license". Let me pay the usage to the LLM monthly depending on my actual usage, and pay you to build a very nice prompt engineering system.