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AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

deepwiki.com

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Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#81

Post by rwmj »

blopker wrote: post #16

I took a look at a project I maintain[0], and wow. It's so wrong in every section I saw. The generated diagrams make no sense. The text sections take implementation details that don't matter and present them to the user like they need to know them. It's also outdated. I hope actual users never see this. I dread thinking about having to go around to various LLM generated sites to correct documentation I never approved…

I tried it on a big OCaml project (https://deepwiki.com/libguestfs/virt-v2v) and it seems correct albeit very superficial. It helps that the project is extensively documented and the code well commented, because my feeling is that it's digesting those code comments along with the documentation to produce the diagrams. It seems decent as a starting point to understanding the shape of the project if I'd never seen it before. This is the sort of thing you could do yourself but it might take an hour or more, so having it done for you is a productivity gain.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#82

Post by frumiousirc »

blopker wrote: post #16

I took a look at a project I maintain[0], and wow. It's so wrong in every section I saw. The generated diagrams make no sense. The text sections take implementation details that don't matter and present them to the user like they need to know them. It's also outdated. I hope actual users never see this. I dread thinking about having to go around to various LLM generated sites to correct documentation I never approved…

I have a fairly large code base that has been developed over a decade that deepwiki has indexed. The results are mixed but how they are mixed gives me some insight into deepwiki's usefulness.

The code base has a lot of documentation in the form of many individual text files. Each describe some isolated aspect of the code in dense, info-rich and not entirely easily consumable (by humans) detail. As numerous as these docs are, the code has many more aspects that lack explicit documentation. And there is a general lack of high-level documentation that tie each isolated doc into some cohesive whole.

I formed a few conclusions about the deepwiki-generated content: First, it is really good where it regurgitates information from the code docs while being rather bad or simply missing for aspects not covered by the provided docs. Second, deepwiki is so-so for providing a high layer of documentation that sort of ties things together. Third, it is highly biased about the importance of various aspects by their code docs coverage.

The lessons I take from this are: deepwiki does better ingesting narrative than code. I can spend less effort on polishing individual documentation (not worrying about how easy it is for humans to absorb). I should instead spend that effort to fill in gaps, both details and to provide higher-level layers of narrative to unify the detailed documentation. I don't need to spend effort on making that unification explicit via sectioning, linking, ordering, etc as one may expect for a "manual" with a table of contents.

In short, I can interpret deepwiki's failings as identifying gaps that need filling by humans while leaning on deepwiki (or similar) to provide polish and some gap putty.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#83

Post by frumiousirc »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #5

I tried a few different repositories (both my own and various other people’s projects). They all yield the same: No repositories found No repositories matching "https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/ImapGoose" were found. Probably broken/down right now?

deepwiki doesn't spider. Repos are indexed upon request. The request dialog accepts a non-github URL.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#84

Post by ofalkaed »

I am quite impressed, even if it was not completely right and provided a few rather humorous charts, it is close enough assuming you are following along with the code. A great improvement over the alternatives for getting oriented in unfamiliar code, should save me a great deal of time.

The only issues I have with it are that they layout is not great on small screens, poor experience on my 13" laptop, and I really wish you could hide the "Ask Devin" dialog. The experience is pretty good on my tablet though, I would prefer to use the tablet for reading/annotating the code and have deepwiki on the laptop but not that big of a deal.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#86

Post by 63stack »

jorvi wrote: post #60
cuuupid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV, my experience with DeepWiki is that it’s decent but the DX of the documentation is horrible and the diagrams are often just incorrect. Worth mentioning this is a Cognition / Devin on-ramp and has been posted on HN a few times in just a couple months, feels a little sales-y to me.

From the title I assumed it would generate docs to put in the repo. But it's docs outside the dev's purview on a deepwiki url, used to shepherd people into Devin. Wow. Talk about slimy.

Just another parasitic way of extracting value out of open source

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#87

Post by 63stack »

This is one of those sites I filtered out from my Kagi search results. Too often I stumble onto this when I'm looking for something, and it's never ever useful. There is never a time I want to look at flowcharts when looking for documentation, a solution to an error message I'm facing, or a syntax for something.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#88

Post by onion2k »

billyp-rva wrote: post #80
onion2k wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to the lodash docs and asked about how I'd use the 'pipeline' operator (which doesn't exist) and it correctly pointed out that pipeline isn't a thing, and suggested chain() for normal code and flow() for lodash fp instead. That's pretty much spot on. If I was guessing I'd suggest that the base model has a lot more lodash code examples in the training data, which probably makes a big difference to the quality o…

The lack of a pipeline operator in JS (and JS libraries like lodash) has also been discussed online a lot.

Exactly the point. If there's a lot of data in the training set the results will be better.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#89

Post by billyp-rva »

onion2k wrote: post #88
billyp-rva wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of a pipeline operator in JS (and JS libraries like lodash) has also been discussed online a lot.

Exactly the point. If there's a lot of data in the training set the results will be better.

I guess I'm trying to emphasize the distinction between information in the repo (code) vs. information elsewhere (discussions) that the model looks at.

Re: AI documentation you can talk to, for every repo

#90

Post by vultour »

blopker wrote: post #16

I took a look at a project I maintain[0], and wow. It's so wrong in every section I saw. The generated diagrams make no sense. The text sections take implementation details that don't matter and present them to the user like they need to know them. It's also outdated. I hope actual users never see this. I dread thinking about having to go around to various LLM generated sites to correct documentation I never approved…

> I hope actual users never see this

I have bad news for you, this website has been appearing near the top of the search results for some time now. I consciously avoid clicking on it every time.

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