Show HN: Automate Software Documentation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Automate Software Documentation

digitalbrain.app

32 pointsKesava13128 comments

I browsed your site and watched the only sample movie you have. For a product claiming automated documentation I guess you are not eating your own dogfood here.

The movie shows no documentation at all except flashing poorly filled API docs which everybody already generates using any doc framework that pulls that from source code comments. The other part of the movie shows options to type documentation and an image that appears when you right click and select UML. The image isn't UML though nor is the movie showing anything on how it was obtained or generated.

I wish you luck but it seems you did not solve the problem yet.

Hello Hacker News! We're Kesava and Dmitry from Digital Brain [digitalbrain.app]

We're building a platform to automate processes when you're doing software documentation.

We live in a hacker house and we're surrounded by some world-class engineers working on cutting edge startups, but one of the biggest bottlenecks is software documentation. So we built Digital Brain to help solve this problem.

Digital Brain auto-generates your source code documentation and then provides a beautiful Notion-like interface to finish up with the documentation process — streamlining and recommending what to document when.

Here's a quick demo if you'd like to see it in action before trying us out:(https://bit.ly/3eGwCdG)

We're really happy we get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments.

I do like the concept, and we have struggled internally to document things. I am interested in it but the biggest thing missing for me is documentation. I can't really tell how to do it, so for me I am not really willing to try and connect and just figure out.

I do wish you luck and I think you are in the ballpark of something good here.

Hi! Sorry we did not have a better CTA. Here's a one-minute form to help you get onboard: https://bit.ly/3aoFAZO

There's actually no need for documentation - we have a one-click integration to Github, where you'll click the repo and the documentation gets auto-generated. Excited to let you try it!

There is very much a need for documentation. I keep hearing "auto-generated" documentation, but I don't see what differentiates this from other tools that generate docs from code comments. Without more detailed information about what this tool does, there is no reason to pursue it further.

There are myriad questions that need answering with docs:

- What does autogenerating documentation mean? (in my book, exposing code comments is not autogeneration so hopefully there is more)

- When I edit function documentation does it also change the code comments? Vice versa?

- How is the documentation version controlled?

- How are multiple versions of a library documented?

- What level of customization do I get? Just look at the Sphinx ecosystem for all of the things that people end up needing to customize.

- The chore part of documentation is thinking about what to write and writing it so that it is easy to understand - does this actually help me here?

One big thing that seems to be missing is what languages/frameworks does this tool support?

Right now, we're able to fully support Python.

So little information about what it is that I don't even want to waste time requesting early access.

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