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Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

261 points david927 | 1 comments | 23 Feb 25 23:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.267s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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jtwaleson ◴[24 Feb 25 08:27 UTC] No.43157056[source]▶
I'm creating an infinite canvas that has all your organization's code and documentation on it. If you zoom in, you can see the code, if you zoom out you see the big picture. By giving everything a place on the map, it becomes easier to figure out your way through the landscape and understand the systems. Different modes can you show you different things: code age, authorship (bus-factor, is the person still with the company etc), languages used, security issues. There's time-travel, think Gource for all software in your company, and maybe the most fun: a GeoGuessr for code. Select the repos for your team (or if you feel confident, of the entire org), you get a snippet and have to guess where it is. The plan is for LLMs + tree-sitter to analyze all the code and show relations to other systems, databases etc.

I had the idea 2 years ago, but starting building in earnest 2 months ago. Spending all my time on it now, minus 3 or 4 days per week of earning money. Currently looking for a GTM/sales-oriented cofounder in NL.

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muzani ◴[24 Feb 25 08:40 UTC] No.43157136[source]▶
Definitely want this kind of thing.
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jtwaleson ◴[24 Feb 25 08:51 UTC] No.43157225[source]▶
Thanks! If you or other interested people in this thread are in a position to pay for it, let me know and I'll see what I can do for you!
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1. muzani ◴[24 Feb 25 10:01 UTC] No.43157734[source]▶
I would pay for it as an individual. Just things like going into code and spending 3 weeks reverse engineering everything is not ideal. Especially if it's something where the entire team has quit or been laid off. And lately the solution for that is just rewriting the damn thing lol.

How much we're willing to pay is a whole other question. I feel like this is the kind of thing that Cursor already does by itself but it's just not releasing a user-readable output of it.

It won't likely be a subscription thing, but one off payments per repo makes sense, and there should be some kind of satisfaction guarantee or say, charge to have the output in a human readable format.

Monorepos are also a pain. On the front end, they sometimes share design. On BE they may share databases. It would be cool to break it down into DDD-style domains if applicable or propose things like anti corruption layers. More often it's like a "pacific ocean meets atlantic ocean" kind of thing, where you can tell there's a difference in the way things are done, but it's not entirely clear where the border is. This would probably be worth a lot more.

To a much lesser extent, an architectural copilot would also make sense. On the front end, we have a lot of redundant components. Say a button might be PrimaryButton, but the same thing is GreenButton or FilledNoOutlineButton by other devs. We tried documenting this which just ended up being a waste of 1 week because nobody read the doc. It's worse with complex components like TwoButtonModal vs TwoButtonModalWithClose. And what happens is code is always built in parallel; people don't realize that the designer's new style applies to both teams so you get two people building the same components at the same time. Not a major problem, but I think this is worth a few cents every PR.

Ultimately it's hard to gauge. Like Copilot underdelivered, Cursor overdelivers, and yet both essentially do the same thing. I guess the amount we're willing to pay is just vibe-based.