I am quite skeptical and reserved when it comes to AI, particularly as it relates to impacts of the next generation of engineers. But using AI to learn a code base has been life-changing. Using a crutch to feel your way around. Then ditching the crutch when things are familiar, like using a map until you learn the road yourself.

This is an interesting approach. I think, in a way, it mirrors what I do. Having contracted for much of my career, I’ve had to get up to speed on a number of codebases quickly. When I have a choice of how to do this, I find a recently closed issue and try to write a unit test for it. If nothing else, you learn where the tests live, assuming they exist, and how much of a safety net you have if you start hacking away at things. Once I know how to add tests and run them (which is a really good way to deal with the codebase setup problem mentioned in the article because a lot of onboarding docs only get you to the codebase running without all the plumbing you need), I feel like I can get by without a full understanding of the code as I can throw in a couple of tests to prove what I want to get to and then hope the tests or CI or hooks prevent me from doing A Bad Thing. Not perfect and it varies depending on on how well the project is built and maintained, but if I can break things easily, people are probably used to things breaking and then I have an avenue to my first meaningful contribution. Making things break less.

GitHub Next comes to mind

https://githubnext.com/projects/repo-visualization/

Do you guys remember the smalltalk toolkit posted here a while ago which their creators made specifically for help understanding new codebases?

The building of the visualiser was less interesting to me than the result and your conclusion. I agree that finding new ways to ingest the structure and logic of software would be very useful, and I like your solution. Is there a way to test it out?

In reverse engineering we often use Graph View to see execution flow as well. Glad to see it being used elsewhere

I always thought to do this visualization in 3d and maybe with VR. Not sure how useful or pleasing experience it would be. Kudos to the author of the project to get this done!

This may be where AI coding tools unlock us. Being able to build tooling against novel concepts that change how we approach reading and writing code. I like it!

A use case that interests me is dynamic visualization for debugging, when there are interacting systems.

- But I'll admit, this isn't precisely how I would do it today

How would you do it today?

You are so lucky to have git history and issues to work from!

Cool project! Would you be willing to share the source code?