Hey Dev.to community! As a software engineer, I’ve spent way too many hours lost in sprawling codebases, tracing dependencies, or writing technical documents that are stale by next sprint. It’s exhausting, right? Tools like Copilot speed up coding the boilerplate stuff, but they don’t help me understand complex projects or keep docs current. I’m exploring two ideas to tackle this, inspired by an open-source project I’m tinkering with, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!
The Struggle: Codebases Only Grow
Picture this: You join a new team, open a repo, and it’s a maze of folders with no clear guide. Or you’re updating a project, but the README hasn’t been touched in months. At my day job, I spend over half my time just reading code to figure out what’s going on. Writing and maintaining docs is another time-sink—boring, tedious, and always falling behind. Anyone else stuck in this loop?
Some Ideas to Make Life Easier
I’m brainstorming ways to simplify this mess with AI-powered tools. Here are two concepts I’m excited about:
1. Automated folder-level README.md
What if an AI could scan your code and create a README.md for every folder in your repo? It’d summarize what each folder does—say, explaining the /utils folder’s helper functions—and update automatically when you change the code. No more manual doc-writing or begging colleagues for context. I’m imagining an open-source tool that makes docs granular and current, even for chaotic repos. (Those existing good products are not open source.)
2. Smarter Code Search with Fine-Tuned Embeddings
The RAG has been really trendy for the past few years, but generic models often miss the mark.
Since those automated docs generated above can be served to construct the dataset for the fine-tuning, I’m exploring a generic pipeline to provide fine-tuning embedding models (like Roberta) on target repo to understand its unique style and structure. This could make searches pinpoint-accurate, so asking “Where’s the login logic?” pulls the exact file. (Do you think it's an overkill?)
What about you?
These are early ideas, and I want to swap stories and brainstorm with you all:
- What's the worst codebase headache you've faced?
- Would auto-generated READMEs or smarter code search make your day easier?
- Got any must-have features or tools you love for this stuff?
I’m playing with these concepts in an open-source project, so if you’re into collaborating or just want to poke around, check it out here. Let’s make codebases less painful together!
Happy coding,
Gaby
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