Show HN: CodeBoarding – interactive map of your codebase for onboarding

22 brovatten 8 5/21/2025, 8:20:57 AM github.com ↗
Hey HN, we are Alex and Ivan, two developers who’ve spent too many afternoons trying to understand unfamiliar repos. Like most devs, we don’t enjoy wading through dense docs to get up to speed — so we built CodeBoarding to make codebase onboarding a more interactive experience.

Last year, I (Alex) was onboarding at a biotech company in the R&D phase applying ML. As you can imagine, when a team of scientists from non CS-background come together, the code gets pretty messy and full of domain-specific quirks. During my time there, I asked a lot of questions, yet when my internship came to an end, I couldn't explain to a new hire in under thirty minutes what "preprocessor_KLN_v3.py" was doing. I had gotten used to the mess.

Our diagram generation combines static analysis and LLM agents to scale to bigger projects, that otherwise could not be processed by pure LLMs, and to reduce hallucinations. We create "abstract" components you can click to go to a lower level, along with short summaries for every component.

You can explore sample maps here: https://github.com/CodeBoarding/GeneratedOnBoardings and generate new ones (Python only atm.) here: https://codeboarding.org/demo. In two weeks, we’ll open up a small batch of free hosted licenses for a VSCode extension - post below if you’d like one.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the demo to improve onboarding. Cheers!

Comments (8)

vivekraja07 · 5h ago
Great idea - I've tried it on several of my repos and it's better than other tools out in the market
nikkalmc · 6h ago
I tried a couple of repos and so far it seems good. The only feedback I have (which I believe you are already working on) is more information about each individual class. A simple example would be how do different classes communicate, or how does one class uses another one, etc. So pretty much more information about how the data is moved around and how it is transformed.

Still it looks great. Excited to see how this evolves.

PerTheBear · 2h ago
Looks great
vallersvik · 5h ago
Great tool, very useful!
ayukh · 6h ago
Great idea!
LegendAren · 12h ago
Good idea. Will it be possible to onboard locally in the future?
brovatten · 11h ago
The static analysis will be moved locally when we launch the extension - and the LLM can be an on-premise model as long as it's Azure-hosted.
anton_holmberg · 12h ago
Love the idea! Will try it.