Comment by its-kostya

Just ask it what naturally draws your curiosity and use it to build your mental model. I may add that our company got us enterprise subscription (so models aren't trained on our IP) so I can just point it at the entire codebase, rather than copying/pasting snippets into a chat window.

What does this program accomplish? How does it accomplish it? Walk me through the boot sequence. Where does it do ABC?

I work in a company where I frequently interact with adjacent teams' code bases. When working on a ticket that touches another system, I'll typically tell it what I'm working on and ask it to point me to areas in the code that are responsible for that capability and which tests exercise that code. This is a great head start for me. I then start "in the ball park".

I would not recommend to have it make diagrams for you. I don't know what it is but they LLMs just aren't great at coveting information into diagram form. I've had it explain, quite impressively, parts of code and when I ask it to turn that into a diagram it comes up short. Must be low on training data expressing itself in that medium. It's an okay way to get the syntax for a diagram started, however.

I wish you an auspicious time in your new role!