About whether ChatGPT can summarize a big, unfamiliar codebase.
Has this happened?
Yes 77 (66%)Not sure 23 (20%)No 17 (15%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether ChatGPT can summarize a big, unfamiliar codebase.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
It can't do that yet but I'm really excited about the day coming when AI can understand an entire code base.
ChatGPT has already completely revolutionized programming for me, I loove forward to further advances.
It's truly unbelievable, like have a permanent pair programmer with me who I can ask how things work, how to fix problems, and more importantly than anything else, ask for examples of how to do things, which I then hack into my code.