Codesplaining

I’m generally wary of the AI hype now, but to be fair, it’s great for some tasks. Yesterday I used ChatGPT today to explain a piece a code I wrote, as a commit note to myself for future reference. It was for a plugin.

That saved me many minutes trying to find the right words!

I could do with more codesplaining!
Where was this when I started learning coding?!

I mean, people had been using GPT-3 for boilerplate code for some time now, and it’s great, agree. Explaining code felt like a use case that’s really standout and unique though, and tapped on ChatGPT’s strengths as a language model. We could always get template code even before AI came along, but a service explaining code to a coding noob? Not sure I came across it before until recently.

And codesplaining is also great for debugging too! As it explained my code line by line, it reminded me that I have a variable that I left in there that isn’t used (I forgot to delete). Just brilliant!

I’ve not tried any dedicated codesplaining apps/extensions, and I wonder if there’s a market for them? 🤔

A quick Google search for “code explainers” and there’s already a whole bunch of them:

https://explain.dev/
https://denigma.app/
https://www.explaincode.app/
https://www.figstack.com/app/explain
https://docs.replit.com/power-ups/ghostwriter/explain-code

Ok so lots of options already… market validated?
OMG some are really good, like explain.dev
But what can I bring to the table that’s unique?

So am I gonna do it or what?

Thanks to the timely nudge by @randomshenans, I am now the proud owner of codesplainingai.com:

Now comes the hard part. 😅