Reading a new codebase is one of the most underrated hard problems in engineering. You clone a repo. 40 files. No docs. You're lost for an hour before writing a single line. I built Codebase Explainer to fix that — a tool that takes any GitHub repo and gives you an AI-generated map of what it actually does. How it works: → Paste a GitHub repo URL → GitHub API fetches the file tree and source → Groq API (Llama) reads the code and generates plain-English explanations per module → D3.js renders an interactive graph showing structure and dependencies The interesting engineering problems: Context window management — You can't dump an entire repo into an LLM call. Had to design a chunking strategy: summarize files individually, then synthesize at the module level. Two-pass architecture. GitHub API constraints — Rate limits hit fast on public repos without auth. Built token-based auth handling to stay within limits without breaking the flow. D3.js with dynamic data — D3 is powerful and painful. Making the graph actually readable (not a hairball) with real repo data required intentional layout decisions, not just default force simulation. What this is really about: Most AI dev tools wrap GPT in a chatbox. This one produces a visual artifact — something you can navigate, not just read. That distinction shaped every design decision. What I'd add next: Cross-file dependency tracing. Right now it's file-level. Making it symbol-level (function calls, imports) would make it genuinely production-useful. Tech stack: Frontend: React + Vite Backend: Node.js + Express AI: Groq API (for code explanation/summarization) Visualization: D3.js (dependency/structure graphs) External API: GitHub API (repo fetching) Deployment: Render, Vercel GitHub: https://lnkd.in/gaXiVsK9 Live Link: https://lnkd.in/gsuEV73y #DevTools #React #D3js #AI #GroqAPI #FullStack #MERN #BuildInPublic #OpenSource

this looks pretty cool

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Pretty interesting tool. Good job Aatman :)

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