Stenography

A smart codebase documenter combining AI & code parsing

21 followers

A smart codebase documenter combining AI & code parsing

21 followers

Stenography combines state of the art AI technology (OpenAI Codex) and code parsing techniques to create a smart codebase documenter. Stenography is designed to to fit the natural dev flow and do what dev tools have always promised us: decrease cognitive load!

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Launch tags:Productivity•Developer Tools•Artificial Intelligence

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Stenography

Maker

Hey all, I'm Bram, founder and creator of Stenography. In the following wall of text, you'll be able to understand the philosophy of Stenography, why it is valuable, and what's next. # Why Stenography? Why now? With the introduction of GPT-3, Codex and other machine learning models at scale, we are entering a world where machines no longer have to be programmed meticulously to supply value to humans. We can train adaptable models to solve moving target problems, and make our lives easier and more fulfilling as new problems replace old in the infinite game of universal complexity. # Creative Content I've been in the business of content creation around creative coding for a couple of years now and the process always looked something along the lines of: 1. have an idea 2. sketch out idea on paper 3. write code for idea 4. get stuck and go to Google for answers 5. return to number 3 until project is complete In addition to that workflow, there is the workflow of sharing with the project with others (because no one is realistically going to sit there and read your code): 1. decide what concepts are important and which are not 2. distill information into the necessary 3. write/record/speak 4. mess up or get stuck 5. edit 6. return to number 3 until finished The thing is, that's a LOT of work. Doing both workflows requires a good understanding of TWO audiences: humans and machines. ## Humans Don't Talk Machine The core value addition of Stenography is that it decreases the amount of time that you as a human need to speak machine. Speaking machine is a hard thing to do. It's like juggling numbers in one's mind, while also thinking of a step as a series of smaller steps. "What did this subroutine do again?" "How do I split this string by character index?" "Why is this null??" Documentation (in theory) helps humans tell other humans what they told a machine to do. The reason for this is that there are MANY ways to solve the same programming problem (check out 'Comparison of server-side web frameworks' on Wikipedia). We write documentation to convey to our fellow human beings what the code written for the machine is doing. But why can't the code tell us itself? Why do we need to serve as author AND translator? # The Two Parts of Stenography Stenography broadly works on two layers: the parsing layer and the explanation layer. ## The Parsing Layer If you're familiar with Kolmogorov complexity, you'll know that not all code patterns are created equal. Some code is MUCH more dense than other code, and a lot of it comes down to the author that wrote the code, their mindset around code abstraction and obfuscation, and how long it is until lunch. The goal of the parser layer is to find sufficiently complex code blocks up to the level of expertise that the AI can break down into a helpful explanation. (wait, what? ._.) In other words, the parser layer uses my and other developer's expertise in their native coding language (JS, Python, C, etc.) to capture the idiosyncrasies of the code and determine where the RIGHT code is for the AI to step in. This requires human creativity, and an expert who can grasp where humans and the AI tend to get stuck/bundle functionality of code. ## The Explanation Layer The explanation layer requires another strategy. The first (and most important) question to ask: What IS a good explanation? The answer: it depends. An explanation is only good IF the target audience understands it AND can act upon it. The explanation cannot be too simple or too complex. It cannot be too short, or two long. It must stay focused, but it must supply external resources when necessary. This part of Stenography is fun because not only is it more subjective, it requires an understanding of the psychology of the reader. In addition, the AI often just doesn't want to cooperate, so cajoling it to return a helpful explanation is much more art than science. Both of these layers serve the overall goal of Stenography: developer productivity. # Developer Productivity Finally, the most important part of designing Stenography for me was to create a tool that integrated seamlessly into the development workflow. Too often tools will make you go out of your way to supply value, or forcibly change the habits of their host. Stenography Autopilot API runs automatically on save in the VSC extension. It writes CodeLenses and gives developers the option to add the comment to the file if they want to. It reads multiple languages, and tries to stay out of the way as much as possible, while supplying a nice buzz when the AI not only correctly describes code, but teaches the developer something new. Most importantly, Stenography gives developers a jumping off point to get back to doing what they actually want to do: WRITE CODE. If you made it this far into the essay, download the extension and try Stenography on your own code! To end on an anecdote: I git pulled a file I've never seen before, opened it in VSC for the very first time and was greeted by a wall of unfamiliar code. I held in my heart the hope of adding to it, leaving it in a better place than I found it, but it stared back cold and imposing. After a moment, I saw little silent gray lines populate the file like stars on the outskirts of a metropolitan area. Little islands of respite, giving me a smooth runway for take off. Little patches of knowledge, flattening the friction of the learning curve of something new. I sat back in my chair, relaxed my shoulders slightly, and thought to myself, "Finally, Automatic Documentation." --- Bram

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5yr ago

@bramses Looking at big picture, the idea is good. It could really help. However, for a non-native English guy, name (stenography) seems overly sophisticated. You are mentioning also AI. The example with tshirt or shoes...well no need for AI there...this is just NLP. And in such easy example it also does not make sense.

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5yr ago

Stenography

Maker

@cybersuggestt *from the comment below* great feedback thank you. as for the 'shoes'/'tshirt' example, it was merely showing that the ai adapts to code changes. it works on harder stuff too :)

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5yr ago

leerly

This is phenomenal - the market use case for this is enormous, whether it's onboarding new programmers, understanding code from a paper, resolving issues in legacy code basis, and so on. I could see this in every programmers stack as a must have tool.

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5yr ago

Stenography

Maker

@ulrikulrikulrik great points! there is indeed a LOT of confusing code out in the world XD

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5yr ago

Looking at big picture, the idea is good. It could really help. However, for a non-native English guy, name (stenography) seems overly sophisticated. You are mentioning also AI. The example with tshirt or shoes...well no need for AI there...this is just NLP. And in such easy example it also does not make sense.

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5yr ago

Stenography

Maker

@konrad_bujak great feedback thank you. as for the 'shoes'/'tshirt' example, it was merely showing that the ai adapts to code changes. it works on harder stuff too :)

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5yr ago

Very impressed. Unfortunately, it seems really easy to use up one's API calls. I was making edits to code comments Stenography made to a file and managed to use up all my calls just doing that.

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5yr ago

Stenography

Maker

@davidshq hey Dave, thank you for the candid feedback! As it stands, I'm bootstrapping Steno (indie style!) and am paying for each invocation so I can't offer unlimited just yet. Email me at bram@stenography.dev you and set you up with more tokens :)

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5yr ago

Sealit

Amazing! It is so well organized and neatly formed tool! I must say that even tho I do not have much experience in coding, and I am slowly trying to improve - Stenography first of all - simply makes an order in my head and remove my fears... Thank you for the implementation of the idea, and for such a nice explanation! ^_^ Big congrats on the launch! ^_^

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5yr ago

Stenography

Maker

@maria_brm thank you so much for the kind words!! enjoy the journey of learning to code -- its rewarding! :D

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5yr ago

Sealit

@bramses Thanks for allowing the journey of learning to be more clarified and joyful! ^_^

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5yr ago

I've been using Stenography Autopilot since it was in Beta, and it has made a _huge_ impact on my work. I use the codelens feature daily when I'm trying to understand complicated pieces of the codebase at my company in both Rails and React. The explanations are right >90% of the time, and the times when it's not spot-on usually indicate to me that the code block might need to be refactored or broken up into more logical pieces. So even when it doesn't work perfectly, it still helps me! Even after using it for a few months now, the explanation still blow my mind every time. I can think of a myriad of ways that Stenography can be useful: - Understanding complicated code - Creating PR descriptions - Onboarding new engineers to a project to get them up to speed with the codebase - Helping you organize your code into logical blocks - Helping product people understand what's going on behind the scenes - Codebase search-ability I've also had a few conversations with the creator of Stenography, and he's super open to feedback. I even requested that they add support for Ruby (which didn't exist at the time), and Bram implemented it in less than a week. I can't speak highly enough about this product and company, and I've recommended it to multiple colleagues and friends.

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5yr ago

Congrats on the launch! ?makers, what do you love the most about Stenography?

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5yr ago

Stenography

Maker

@anna_voronina148 great question! for me, i really like the aspect of figuring out how to make stenography a frictionless addition to current dev workflow. i think devs (and non devs) already do so much work around code, these tools should make life easier, not harder in another way :)

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5yr ago

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