Exploring codebases with AI

Good LLMs are great at answering questions about code.

This is also very low stakes: the worst that can happen is they might get something wrong, which may take you a tiny bit longer to figure out. It's still likely to save you time compared to digging through thousands of lines of code entirely by yourself.

The trick here is to dump the code into a long context model and start asking questions. My current favorite for this is the catchily titled gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05, a preview of Google's Gemini 2.0 Pro which is currently free to use via their API.

Source: Here's how I use LLMs to help me write code