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Ask HN: How do teams maintain understanding of large, long-lived codebases?

2•Parbhat-Kapila•1h ago
I’ve been working on a tool called RepoDoc, focused on tracking and explaining how real codebases evolve.

What keeps coming up is that the hardest part isn’t generating docs or summaries. It’s preserving understanding as repositories grow in size, language mix, and history.

I’m curious how teams here handle this in practice.

Do you rely on conventions, internal tooling, documentation, or mostly social knowledge? What tends to break first as a codebase gets older?

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This is so essential.

Anything less is a very poor substitute at best.

IOW you can rake in the bucks a lot of other ways, outperform your wildest expectations and be perfectly satisfied financially, but you're really quite poor by comparison to how rich you would be if you did it right from the beginning.

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