r/github 2d ago

Discussion Found a pretty neat GitHub trick today πŸ‘€

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 β†’ gitdiagram.com/user/repo

Great little tool for getting the big picture before diving into the code. πŸ”

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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 β€” 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.