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Piper Barkly
Piper Barkly

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🛠️ Introducing Barkly Docs — Making Codebases Easier for Humans to Understand

Ever opened a codebase and wondered how all the pieces fit together?

That's the problem I'm working to solve with Barkly Docs, an open-source project from Barkly Labs. 💗

Barkly Docs reads software projects and generates human-friendly HTML documentation to help people understand what's inside a codebase and how its components connect.

🐾 Project overviews
🔎 Entity documentation
🔗 Component relationships
🗺️ Visual relationship maps

The goal is to make unfamiliar codebases easier to navigate, understand, and contribute to—without requiring everyone to manually dig through thousands of files.

I'm building Barkly Docs in the open, improving its language support and performance as development continues.

This project is part of the larger Barkly Labs mission:

Can we make computers front-load the hard stuff for humans?

🌐 Explore the source code and contribute:
https://github.com/Barkly-Labs/Barkly-Docs

If you like open-source developer tools, humane technology, or making software more understandable, I'd love for you to check it out! 🐾

Top comments (2)

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baumgaerben profile image
baumgaerben •

Đọc xong thấy nhớ đến những lần onboarding dev mới vào repo legacy 500k+ lines — mất 2 tuần chỉ để hiểu "function này gọi đâu, data flow ra sao". Code comment và README thường outdated ngay sau khi merge, nên cuối cùng team phải tự vẽ diagram trên giấy hoặc dùng tool gen UML từ code (PlantUML, Mermaid) rồi đính kèm vào PR description.

Thứ mình quan tâm: Barkly handle như thế nào với dynamic dispatch / plugin architecture? Ví dụ codebase dùng DI container heavy, interface implementation được register tại runtime — static analysis thường bỏ lỡ các edge case này. Có cơ chế nào để annotate hoặc hint thủ công cho những luồng "ma thuật" này không?

Cũng tò mò về việc sync với git history: khi refactor lớn (tách module, rename package), doc có tự detect breaking change và flag section cần review không? Hay vẫn cần con người rà soát thủ công? (site: labagent .tech)

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barklylabs profile image
Piper Barkly •

Hey so like im stil wokring on it rn it supports ruby and python and java rn but im trying to fix soem project recontiontoion things so like i would love ur input to improve it and mabey some help