Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

https://github.com/The-Pocket/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge

166•zh2408•7h ago

Comments

badmonster•7h ago

do you have plans to expand this to include more advanced topics like architecture-level reasoning, refactoring patterns, or onboarding workflows for large-scale repositories?

zh2408•7h ago

Yes! This is an initial prototype. Good to see the interest, and I'm considering digging deeper by creating more tailored tutorials for different types of projects. E.g., if we know it's web dev, we could generate tutorials based more on request flows, API endpoints, database interactions, etc. If we know it's a more long-term maintained projects, we can focus on identifying refactoring patterns.

kristopolous•7h ago

Have you ever seen komment.ai? Is so did you have any issues with the limitation of the product?

I haven't used it, but it looks like it's in the same space and I've been curious about it for a while.

I've tried my own homebrew solutions, creating embedding databases by having something like aider or simonw's llm make an ingests json from every function, then using it as a rag in qdrant to do an architecture document, then using that to do contextual inline function commenting and make a doxygen then using all of that once again as an mcp with playwright to hook that up through roo.

It's a weird pipeline and it's been ok, not great but ok.

I'm looking into perplexica as part of the chain, mostly as a negation tool

zh2408•6h ago

No, I haven't, but I will check it out!

One thing to note is that the tutorial generation depends largely on Gemini 2.5 Pro. Its code understanding ability is very good, combined with its large 1M context window for a holistic understanding of the code. This leads to very satisfactory tutorial results.

However, Gemini 2.5 Pro was released just late last month. Since Komment.ai launched earlier this year, I don't think models at that time could generate results of that quality.

kristopolous•6h ago

I've been using llama 4 Maverick through openrouter. Gemini was my go to but I switched basically the day it came out to try it out.

I haven't switched back. At least for my use cases it's been meeting my expectations.

I haven't tried Microsoft's new 1.58 bit model but it may be a great swap out for sentencellm, the legendary all-MiniLM-L6-v2.

I found that if I'm unfamiliar with the knowledge domain I'm mostly using AI but then as I dive in the ratio of AI to human changes to the point where it's AI at 0 and it's all human.

Basically AI wins at day 1 but isn't any better at day 50. If this can change then it's the next step

zh2408•5h ago

Yeah, I'd recommend trying Gemini 2.5 Pro. I know early Gemini weren't great, but the recent one is really impressive in terms of coding ability. This project is kind of designed around the recent breakthrough.

kristopolous•3h ago

I've used it, I used to be a huge booster! Give llama 4 maverick a try, really.

ryao•5h ago

I would find this more interesting if it made tutorials out if the Linux, LLVM, OpenZFS and FreeBSD codebases.

wordofx•5h ago

I would find this comment more interesting if it didn’t dismiss the project just because you didn’t find it valuable.

zh2408•5h ago

The Linux repository has ~50M tokens, which goes beyond the 1M token limit for Gemini 2.5 Pro. I think there are two paths forward: (1) decompose the repository into smaller parts (e.g., kernel, shell, file system, etc.), or (2) wait for larger-context models with a 50M+ input limit.

rtolsma•4h ago

You can use the AST for some languages to identify modular components that are smaller and can fit into the 1M window

Retr0id•5h ago

The overview diagrams it creates are pretty interesting, but the tone/style of the AI-generated text is insufferable to me - e.g. https://the-pocket.github.io/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/Req...

zh2408•5h ago

Haha. The project is fully open-sourced, so you can tune the prompt for the tone/style you prefer: https://github.com/The-Pocket/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge/bl...

vivzkestrel•1h ago

mind explaining what exactly was insufferable here?

chairhairair•4h ago

A company (mutable ai) was acquired by Google last year for essentially doing this but outputting a wiki instead of a tutorial.

zh2408•4h ago

Their site seems to be down. I can't find their results.

codetrotter•4h ago

Were they acquired? Or did they give up and the CEO found work at Google?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42542512

The latter is what this thread claims ^

manofmanysmiles•4h ago

I love it! I effectively achieve similar results by asking Cursor lots of questions!

Like at least one other person in the comments mentioned, I would like a slightly different tone.

Perhaps good feature would be a "style template", that can be chosen to match your preferred writing style.

I may submit a PR though not if it takes a lot of time.

zh2408•4h ago

Thanks—would really appreciate your PR!

TheTaytay•3h ago

Woah, this is really neat. My first step for many new libraries is to clone the repo, launch Claude code, and ask it to write good documentation for me. This would save a lot of steps for me!

CalChris•3h ago

Do one for LLVM and I'll definitely look at it.

throwaway314155•2h ago

I suppose I'm just a little bit bothered by your saying you "built an AI" when all the heavy lifting is done by a pretrained LLM. Saying you made an AI-based program or hell, even saying you made an AI agent, would be more genuine than saying you "built an AI" which is such an all-encompassing thing that I don't even know what it means. At the very least it should imply use of some sort of training via gradient descent though.

j45•1h ago

It is an application of AI which is just software, and applying it to solve a problem or need.

lionturtle•1h ago

>:( :3

esjeon•1h ago

At the top are some neat high-level stuffs, but, below that, it quickly turns into code-written-in-human-language.

I think it should be possible to extract some more useful usage patterns by poking into related unit tests. How to use should be what matters to most tutorial readers.

chbkall•46m ago

Love this. These are the kind of AI applications we need which aid our learning and discovery.

android521•27m ago

For anyone doubting AI as pure hype, this is the counter example of its usefulness

croes•9m ago

Nobody said AI isn’t useful.

The hype is that AI isn’t a tool but the developer.

zarkenfrood•19m ago

Really nice work and thank you for sharing. These are great demonstrations of the value of LLMs which help to go against the negative view on the impacts to junior engineers. This helps bridge the gap of most projects lacking updated documentation.

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Show HN: I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials

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