HACKER Q&A
📣 nomilk

AI tool for getting oneself across a new repo?


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?

  👤 dtagames Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 vunderba
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.

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