We previously launched Auto Wiki (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915999) in Jan 2024 and broke the ground for AI generated wikis that explain your code. Now this product has been rebuilt by the same team, as well as others and launched as a part of Google. Hope you enjoy.
Although, I've recently moved on to working on Gemini and AI research, I'm still involved as an advisor and founder emeritus of sorts. This team moves extremely fast and while we don't have full availability yet, we're working hard on addressing some early feedback before we make it more widely available including for private repos. Personally, I think the NotebookLM integration is a nice touch and distinguishing factor that we could only do as Google.
Ok so it was acquired and merged into that google offering? Does this mean we lost the open source nature and ability to preserve and protect our data?
Not sure how this is supposed to show. Does it only show stuff about existing repositories?
I put in the URL for a project of mine in Codeberg and didn't seem to be able to do anything - i expected that it'd go clone the repository, parse the code and attempt to tell stuff about it, but all i got was an error :-P.
I see this as a clever code summarization tool. They're careful not to call this "docs" but "wiki", which is a way of saying "this is a repo byproduct you can talk to".
If this is being regenerated every commit, I’d be interested to see the version history and/or being able to see the CodeWiki diff inside a pull request.
Maybe it’s too noisy, if the LLM isn’t stable about the way it’s wording things, or maybe it’s only useful for commits that make significant changes to architecture. However, I do think it’d be interesting to see how the documentation changes over time, as well as seeing how any specific PR changes it.
Also, I looked at golang, and I was definitely expecting a multi-page architecture with lots of cross references, not just one long scrolling field of content.
I don’t understand how this can be more optimal than just reading the documentation that a human already wrote. All “normal” uses can be answered by reading the docs, everything advanced you can just read the code. I’m not sure when I would ever use this?
Reading a ton of docs and interpreting them is a tedious activity. If you can get deducible or inferable answers with AI, that's a huge win. I have faced issues with kubernetes that needed me to wade through the code for days to find it was a missed case or unsupported. AI would help me in minutes. That's the claim here, if it works that way.
I’ve never had AI understand a problem of that depth though. It can maybe surface the right part of the docs to reference but in the times I have used it it leads me down the wrong path half of the time.
Generating and maintaining docs is a massive cost. Presumably the point of this is to reduce that cost. And for projects where the existing documentation is poor or nonexistent, this might be far better than what’s available today.
How well this actually works, though, I have no idea.
Hello HN,
We previously launched Auto Wiki (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915999) in Jan 2024 and broke the ground for AI generated wikis that explain your code. Now this product has been rebuilt by the same team, as well as others and launched as a part of Google. Hope you enjoy.
Although, I've recently moved on to working on Gemini and AI research, I'm still involved as an advisor and founder emeritus of sorts. This team moves extremely fast and while we don't have full availability yet, we're working hard on addressing some early feedback before we make it more widely available including for private repos. Personally, I think the NotebookLM integration is a nice touch and distinguishing factor that we could only do as Google.
I hope you enjoy.
Thank You, Omar (Formerly Founder/CEO MutableAI)
Ok so it was acquired and merged into that google offering? Does this mean we lost the open source nature and ability to preserve and protect our data?
Not sure how this is supposed to show. Does it only show stuff about existing repositories?
I put in the URL for a project of mine in Codeberg and didn't seem to be able to do anything - i expected that it'd go clone the repository, parse the code and attempt to tell stuff about it, but all i got was an error :-P.
Apparently gotta request a new repo. Kinda lame.
Will it be possible to document private repositories? And how can we prevent Google from using the code to train its AI?
Does anyone know of any trustworthy, usable alternatives? Perhaps even ones that run 100% on-premises?
I see this as a clever code summarization tool. They're careful not to call this "docs" but "wiki", which is a way of saying "this is a repo byproduct you can talk to".
If this is being regenerated every commit, I’d be interested to see the version history and/or being able to see the CodeWiki diff inside a pull request.
Maybe it’s too noisy, if the LLM isn’t stable about the way it’s wording things, or maybe it’s only useful for commits that make significant changes to architecture. However, I do think it’d be interesting to see how the documentation changes over time, as well as seeing how any specific PR changes it.
Also, I looked at golang, and I was definitely expecting a multi-page architecture with lots of cross references, not just one long scrolling field of content.
I don’t understand how this can be more optimal than just reading the documentation that a human already wrote. All “normal” uses can be answered by reading the docs, everything advanced you can just read the code. I’m not sure when I would ever use this?
Reading a ton of docs and interpreting them is a tedious activity. If you can get deducible or inferable answers with AI, that's a huge win. I have faced issues with kubernetes that needed me to wade through the code for days to find it was a missed case or unsupported. AI would help me in minutes. That's the claim here, if it works that way.
I’ve never had AI understand a problem of that depth though. It can maybe surface the right part of the docs to reference but in the times I have used it it leads me down the wrong path half of the time.
Generating and maintaining docs is a massive cost. Presumably the point of this is to reduce that cost. And for projects where the existing documentation is poor or nonexistent, this might be far better than what’s available today.
How well this actually works, though, I have no idea.
This doesn't replace docs, nor technical writers.
I encourage you to put your preference to the test on the NixOS and nixpkgs documentation.
Anyone else get an eye twitch when they read or hear "Agentic"?
what word do you prefer?
Full on cringe shivers
cool idea, but I tried searching for ffmpeg, linux, llvm-project - how does it not have the top 10 open source projects in it?
Blog post: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-code-wiki-a...