Code Tours

Developers spend a significant amount of their time reading and comprehending code that they did not write themselves, both in code editing and code review tasks. With recent developments and improvements to code generated by LLMs, this includes AI generated code as well as code written by other human developers.

Current systems offer insufficient support for code comprehension. Developers often have to rely on potentially outdated written documentation and only snapshot git histories of how and why a piece of code was developed. For pull requests, developers have little more information about a change than a set of diffs presented in alphabetical order according to the files the changes were made in. Pull requests may include a few comments, but have little support to guide a developer through the code change.

This points to the need for code tours, a guided interleaving of textual explanations with conceptually grouped related code changes to support code comprehension. This will support both editing and code review tasks for collaboratively edited code.

There are a lot of interesting directions to explore in this area! In particular, I am interested in questions like:

• How can code tours be incorporated into the code review process?
• How can code tours be incorporated into code base exploration (e.g., understanding a library)?
• How can code tours be used to improve comprehension of AI generated code suggestions?