Ask HN: AI tool for getting oneself across a new repo? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: AI tool for getting oneself across a new repo?

2 pointsnomilk5 comments

Suppose I have a completely unfamiliar git repo (containing, ball park ~20 files each of moderate complexity) that I want to get myself across, and documentation is lacking.

Is there any AI/LLM tool that looks at the whole code base (repo) such that I can ask it questions?

In the specific case I have, both the framework and programming languages used are well known but not ones I'm already familiar with.

I don't mind if the tool takes some time to ingest the repo or train itself or whatever (can easily wait an hour or so if that's a consideration). In this case, privacy isn't important.

Any suggestions?

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I would say the short answer is, "No." What you can do, however, is open the repo in VS Code, then ask Copilot about specific sections you highlight. You can ask for an explanation or guidance on how to extend or modify the code.

While "grok the whole codebase" demos are out there, I don't think anyone is there yet in practice. The next contender is likely to be Copilot Workspace, currently in invite beta.

Does CoPilot definitely see the whole repo? I thought it saw just the current file (or part of the current file the user has selected)?

Definitely. And the more you use it with a specific repo, the better it gets. You'll find it can help with auto completion and function calls even in modules several files away.

The Continue extension (Jetbrains, VS Code) can do this to a degree. It spends a bit of time upfront creating an embeddings index of all the files in the repo and from there you can ask questions about the code base.

https://github.com/continuedev/continue

I prefer it to other programs (Cursor, Copilot, etc) because it supports BYOK (Bring your own key) and is pretty granular in terms of letting you assign an embedding provider, assistant model, autocompletion model, etc.

Not sure if this is in the direction that you're going but try storia.ai

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