I'm far, far more interested in having an LLM tell me where particular functionality is in a codebase, and how it works from a high level.
Autogenerating function documentation seems like such a low bar by comparison. It's like taking limited creativity and applying it with high powered tools.
Literally like asking for a faster horse.
Tell me how WebKit generates tiles for rasterizing a document tree. Show me specifically where it takes virtualized rendering commands and translates them into port specific graphics calls.
Show me the specific binary format and where it is written for Unreal Engine 5 .umaps so that I can understand the embedded information for working between different types of software or porting to different engines.
Some codebases are so large that it literally doesn't matter if individual functions are documented when you have to build a mental model of several layers of abstraction to understand how something works.
Completely agree. Explaining how systems work in plain english is much more valuable than just giving inputs and outputs of individual functions. We want to understand how a system and it's subsystems work independently and interdependently.
We're not there yet with Autodoc; there is still tons of work to do.
If you have't tried the demo, give it a shot. You might be surprised.
Have you considered finding a way to instead write a text editor plugin that allows me to talk to a GPT and ask questions about a codebase? This would be a serious technology that moves beyond the in-code documentation paradigm.
Autogenerating function documentation seems like such a low bar by comparison. It's like taking limited creativity and applying it with high powered tools.
Literally like asking for a faster horse.
Tell me how WebKit generates tiles for rasterizing a document tree. Show me specifically where it takes virtualized rendering commands and translates them into port specific graphics calls.
Show me the specific binary format and where it is written for Unreal Engine 5 .umaps so that I can understand the embedded information for working between different types of software or porting to different engines.
Some codebases are so large that it literally doesn't matter if individual functions are documented when you have to build a mental model of several layers of abstraction to understand how something works.