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Posted by andreabergia 15 hours ago

Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer(jimmyhmiller.com)
177 points | 31 commentspage 2
Quiark 10 hours ago|
Do you guys remember the smalltalk toolkit posted here a while ago which their creators made specifically for help understanding new codebases?
xkriva11 10 hours ago|
https://gtoolkit.com/ or https://moosetechnology.org/
bokchoi 5 hours ago||
Woah, that Glamorous Toolkit environment looks amazing. Thanks for the pointer.
jnpnj 6 hours ago||
This is the first thing that I used LLMs on. Not code generation, but parser and tooling to gain understanding. Also saves resources in the long run.
lysace 5 hours ago|
One of my favorite uses for Claude Code is to point it at a section of seriously badly written code with undecipherable symbol names, over the top cyclomatic complexity etc and just ask it to make the code readable.
luxurytent 11 hours ago||
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!
esafak 9 hours ago||
A use case that interests me is dynamic visualization for debugging, when there are interacting systems.
esafak 7 hours ago|
To flesh this out, let me see the volume of calls and data from one place to another. Help diagnose back-pressure, drops, rejections, and any other irregularities.

Think of an on-caller who wants to quickly pinpoint a problem. Visualization could help one understand the nature of the problem before reading the code. Then you could select a part of the visualization and ask the computer to tell you what that part does, if there are any recent changes to it, etc.

satheeshds 10 hours ago||
- But I'll admit, this isn't precisely how I would do it today

How would you do it today?

jimmyhmiller 2 hours ago||
I try to explain what I mean the next few sentences of the post. I have spent a good amount of my career jumping into fairly large code bases. I don't need to take it quite so step by step. I have seen enough code to take shortcuts, to guess at what is there.

But telling people that isn't helpful. I try at the beginning to give more step by step of how I would get into understand the code base if I didn't already know these kinds of shortcuts. (I'm not sure I could write those down, they are just know how and heuristics, like how when you are a starting to code a missing ; can take a much longer time to see than as you've been programming for a while)

onionisafruit 10 hours ago||
I thought that was curious. He says this isn’t how he would do it today then goes on to do it today (or presumably the same day he wrote that he wouldn’t do it this way today).
hxugufjfjf 12 hours ago||
Cool project! Would you be willing to share the source code?
TonyStr 11 hours ago||
You are so lucky to have git history and issues to work from!
gowld 4 hours ago||
Where's the visualizer the blog post talks about?

How is it different from regular code browser/indexers?

indiekitai 11 hours ago|
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