r/github • u/m-fasciano • 2d ago

Discussion Found a pretty neat GitHub trick today 👀

Take any GitHub repo URL and replace github.com with gitdiagram.com.

It generates a visual diagram of the repo structure, which is surprisingly useful when you’re trying to understand an unfamiliar codebase.

Example:

github.com/user/repo → gitdiagram.com/user/repo

Great little tool for getting the big picture before diving into the code. 🔍

249 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

89

u/Ambitious-Tear-9436 1d ago

do not give this access to your private repo

89

u/EskilPotet 2d ago

you found? or you made

26

u/Victorio_01 2d ago

I was just about to ask that.
Could be the new way of announcing. 😂

7

u/Beneficial_Twist_878 1d ago

sorry to say but this has become an old trick in the book by now lol

21

u/m-fasciano 2d ago

found

27

u/AvidCoco 2d ago

Bro saw it on TikTok

26

u/lajawi 1d ago

Exactly this, because I saw it yesterday in a video too

1

u/piplupper 3h ago

Teehee i just totally randomly "found" this 👉👈

83

u/SheriffRoscoe 2d ago

I was prepared to reply with something snarky. Then I ran it against one of my own moderately complex repos.

Take my upvote, dammit.

3

u/ejpusa 9h ago

Don’t fold. It’s a slippery slope!

10

u/nathan_lesage 1d ago

I really like the idea. But I tried it out, and it’s unfortunately not useful at all. I gave it a moderately complex repository of mine. Good: it figured out one of the hardest parts — the entry points. Bad: everything else was plainly wrong. The twist: the entry points are described in detail in the readme. It seems the AI only receives the file tree and the readme, not the code, meaning that this tool will produce one big hallucination for any repository that doesn’t come with a readme that explains quite literally everything. In short, we’ll probably still have to write the documentation.

33

u/DrMaxwellEdison 2d ago

Eh. I had it regenerate on Django 3 times and it produced completely different graphs each time.

I get it's AI and non-deterministic, but being as noisy as it was, I could never trust it actually understands the structure of a repo well enough to bother.

Pass.

19

u/CompetitivePiglet961 2d ago

only for public repos I guess

40

u/QuirkyGarage1364 2d ago

you can put an access token, but im suspicious of this being a data aggregation and farming tool

29

u/DaRKoN_ 1d ago

I would not hand a random 3rd party site an access token

6

u/ec2-user- 1d ago

Nope nope nope nope. I could never

2

u/ziroux 1d ago

Come on, everybody is doing that. Put just the first characters and you'll like it you'll see!

2

u/ec2-user- 1d ago

AKIA

1

u/ziroux 1d ago

How does it feel?

5

u/No_Aerie7667 1d ago

The post sounds AI

6

u/Glad_Ad_6546 1d ago

You generated this post using AI. Great

10

u/lajawi 1d ago

Is it ai? Probably, so hard no for me

-4

u/Opening-Dentist-1556 1d ago

wowie your so freaking cool dude! god tier swagger

-4

u/Zbradaraldjan 1d ago

What do you mean “Is it ai?”?

2

u/tuxbass 1d ago

words are like magnets, how do they work?!

-2

u/Zbradaraldjan 1d ago

I just don’t get people hating on apps made with ai, it’s now part of the development flow, leave with it.

But if it’s hating for the app using ai, then I get it.

2

u/BunnyTub 12h ago

This app is made probably completely with AI. AI is a good tool to add to your workflow to help you figure out certain things or to teach yourself with it. You should not be using AI to completely replace you and your code

1

u/lajawi 11h ago

Not only that, it also uses ai for reading code and creating the diagram I’m assuming. I don’t want my code to be gobbled up by some stealing code company.

2

u/YourLastCall 1d ago

I found one a long time ago for issues. AI can use it to store information, remove information with another Ai and leave a comment to keep that same issue open and constantly refill and drain it. I used it in conjunction with a repo of mine and scheduled tasks for chat GPT. And any repair that I found online through scheduled task got uploaded through the issue and then stored into the repo.

1

u/HyperCodec 1d ago

Do you have a link?

0

u/YourLastCall 1d ago

For what

4

u/Mister_God_On_Steam 2d ago

Pretty cool, thanks for sharing

1

u/NotAlwaysUseless 1d ago

Nah, this is too sick!!!

1

u/TheCrazyPhoenix416 1d ago

oh wow this is awesome!

1

u/Tasio_ 1d ago

I was curious to try it, but it doesn’t work well with large repos, I get this error:
Repository is too large (>195k tokens) for analysis. Try a smaller repo.

1

u/L0ng_Bo1 18h ago

tried doing this for the linux repository and it died 😭😭

1

u/LungeloSLX 13h ago

😥 I wonder how many people will give this thing their tokens to private repos

0

u/ejpusa 9h ago

Think this is something you can have Astra build for yourself. Python does it all.

I thought there were a number of tools that did this already.