Comment by nsonha
7 days ago
isn't that just copilot "explain", one of the earliest copilot capabilities. It's definitely helpful to understand new codebases at a high level
> there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.
unfortunately they're not in any kind of formal language either
> isn't that just copilot "explain", one of the earliest copilot capabilities. It's definitely helpful to understand new codebases at a high level
In my experience this function is quite useless. It will just repeat the code in plain English. It will not explain it.
I was actually positively surprised at how well even qwen2.5-coder:7b managed to talk through a file of Rust. I'm still a current-day-LLM-programming skeptic but that direction, code->English, seems a lot safer, since English is ambiguous anyway. For example, it recognized some of the code shapes and gave English names that can be googled easier.
Haven’t tried copilot but cursor is pretty good at telling me where things are and explaining the high level architecture of medium-largeish codebases, especially if I already vaguely know what I’m looking for. I use this a lot when I need to change some behavior of an open source project that I’m using but previously haven’t touched.
> > there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.
> unfortunately they're not in any kind of formal language either
Most formulas made of fancy LaTeX symbols you find in math papers aren't a formal language either. They usually can't be mechanically translated via some parser to an actual formal language like Python or Lean. You would need an advanced LLM for that. But they (the LaTeX formulas) are still more precise than most natural language. I assume something similar is the case with legalese.