52
Nobody knows how large software products work
(www.seangoedecke.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
52 points (96.4% liked)
Programming
24051 readers
588 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Oh it will definitely tell you something. It will be complete bullshit, but it's something.
Of all the things AI does well, this is one of them
Spouting bullshit? If so, I agree.
Codebases in the 100k+ to 1m+ sloc can be very difficult for a LLM (or human) to answer detailed questions about. A LLM might be able to point you in the right direction, but they don't have enough context size to fit the code, let enough the capability to actually analyze it. Summarize? Sure, but it can only summarize what it has in context.
No, I mean summarizing things. It doesn't need 100k-1m lines in context to give you an accurate picture of what's going on. It certainly doesn't need to invent things to tell you. It could totally give you incorrect assessments based on limited information, but it's bound to be way better than what you could do in a short period off time.
My experience, having actually tried this on a huge codebase: my time was better spent looking at file names and reading source code myself to answer specific questions about the code.
Using it to read a single file or a few of them might go better. If you can find the right files first, you might get decent output.