I don't question that LLMs are useful for answering questions about codebases, but this is closer to "turn a codebase into a curriculum", and... does that actually work?
And that's when the shit hits the fan. :-D Only after concerted effort do the students actually gain understanding.
In practice, what this means is that you have to know how to reproduce the knowledge you've read, in your words. Only then can you be sure you've mastered what you've read. It's the reason for homework and all other stuff we have to do. Reading something five or more times simply does not suffice for our brains.
Its clear one can't really think about anything without building a basic understanding about it. Worth stating that these are distinct from learning. But, I would argue that it is important to know what you *have* to understand now and why is that important. An LLM can help you understand a great many things, you just need to know what you are looking for and that is something no artificial intelligence can really *do* for you. Trial and error, building a sense of self awareness, and talking to people is a better way to know what this is especially for fairly open ended problems.
It reminds me on NX graphs, which are helpful to find the circular dependencies, but other than that, doesn't provide a lot of value as I can see the same kind of structure just looking at the codebase.
Am I doing something wrong with these tools?
Wow. I thought the github clout market would be a bit more subtle about it.
[0] https://github.com/Lum1104/Understand-Anything/commit/9866fc...
[1] https://www.star-history.com/lum1104/understand-anything#his...
Like, having looked at the demo, it feels less intuitive and extra complex than going through the codebase myself with tmux + codex + reading it myself. I think for you to understand the codebase, it should be easier to interact without. This seems to introduce way too many steps to interact with the codebase