DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase
5 comments
·August 24, 2025swiftcoder
Ok, yeah, this feels like a reasonable use case for AI. I generated a DeepWiki from one of my repos, and it's pretty informative. It goes into way too much depth on some trivial details, and glosses over more important stuff in places, but overall it seems to have produced a pretty detailed summary of what the package does, and why it does many things the way that it does.
tacker2000
The Elkjs project uses this and im not really sure i like it. [1]
Its a bit hard to find stuff. I was looking to find the structure of the main configuration json object and couldnt find it in the deepwiki.
I found it on the “non ai created” doc page of the main Elk project[2] (Elkjs is a JS implementation of Elk)
But yes this is of course just one data point.
[1]https://deepwiki.com/kieler/elkjs/5-usage-guide
[2]https://eclipse.dev/elk/documentation/tooldevelopers/graphda...
oriettaxx
very good review (and yes: deepwiki is just amazing!!!)
I would love code could be opensource: I just saw now a couple of attempts
* https://github.com/AsyncFuncAI/deepwiki-open
* https://github.com/AIDotNet/OpenDeepWiki
with several stars
mxmilkiib
neat system
tried it out on Mixxx; https://deepwiki.com/mixxxdj/mixxx
don't know how to zoom the diagrams on mobile tho, n they can easily almost disappear from view when panning around
the prompt box could do with a way to move it out of the way of the bottom couple of cm in portrait, or from covering more than a quarter of the screen in landscape orientation
The DeepWiki tool itself seems pretty neat. It has a pretty good go at collecting documentation from across the codebase and organising it in one place. It has a pretty good guess at coming up with documentation which isn't there.
It strikes me as an example of automated code assistance that's e.g. more useful than "the item under the cursor has type <X>, here's its documentation".
There are things which benefit from being automatically described, and there are things where "the map is not the territory", and you do want someone to have come up with a map.
> "Treat it like a patient senior engineer."
I trust that LLMs are patient (you can ask them stupid questions without consequence).
I do not trust LLMs to act as 'senior'. (i.e. Unless you ask it to, it won't push back against dumb ideas, or suggest better ideas that would achieve what you're trying to do. -- And if you just ask it to 'push back', it's going to push back more than necessary).