[HN Gopher] Google Releases CodeWiki
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Google Releases CodeWiki
Author : 0x79de
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-11-14 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (codewiki.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (codewiki.google)
| oshams wrote:
| 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)
| mannanj wrote:
| 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?
| xena wrote:
| How do I opt out?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Blog post: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-code-
| wiki-a...
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Anyone else get an eye twitch when they read or hear "Agentic"?
| hatmanstack wrote:
| Full on cringe shivers
| bibimsz wrote:
| what word do you prefer?
| quamserena wrote:
| 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?
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| theletterf wrote:
| This doesn't replace docs, nor technical writers.
| sidcool wrote:
| 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.
| quamserena wrote:
| 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.
| linkage wrote:
| I encourage you to put your preference to the test on the NixOS
| and nixpkgs documentation.
| e28eta wrote:
| 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.
| webdevver wrote:
| cool idea, but I tried searching for ffmpeg, linux, llvm-project
| - how does it not have the top 10 open source projects in it?
| ThomasMidgley wrote:
| 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?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Apparently gotta _request_ a new repo. Kinda lame.
| xamde wrote:
| Check out deepwiki.com, which is quite similar and works well
| ThomasMidgley wrote:
| Thank you!
| resfirestar wrote:
| Interesting. I've found Claude Code very useful for answering
| questions about codebases. I think that kind of functionality is
| on the whole more useful than static AI-generated documentation,
| but maybe there's a place for an always-ready and google-able
| starting point.
|
| It badly needs to split up the pages for different parts of large
| codebases. The golang/go page is way too long and the table of
| contents sidebar makes you watch a scrolling animation to expand
| subsections.
| kittikitti wrote:
| I like the idea behind this and think it could be useful for
| agentic applications and reduce hallucinations. However, I
| usually just read the source code for the most up to date
| understanding and it's my best approach. After a quick look at
| CodeWiki, it could be useful to cross reference while analyzing
| the code and I look forward to testing it out next time it could
| apply.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| When will it be deprecated?
| tmsh wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong. You're also generating a decent YouTube
| video from a code base? Pretty cool.
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