Understanding a project - Developer POV

[Komal282000]

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Suppose I want to contribute to a repository. I basically want to know how the project works — what the entry point is, how the functions or workflows are connected, and how the overall program flows. How can I find this kind of information?

I don’t mean the README — I’m looking for a summary or high-level overview of the project that helps contributors understand the structure and logic without spending days or weeks just figuring out how the project works.

[Omkumar2003]

I usually run this one-liner to merge all relevant code into merged.txt and then feed it to an AI (Google AI Studio) to get a high-level summary — basically, any AI that can read the file works the same way, so you can choose which one to use:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Where-Object { $_.FullName -notmatch 'node_modules|\.git' -and $_.Extension -notmatch '\.(png|jpe?g|gif|mp4|mp3|wav|exe|dll)$' } | ForEach-Object { Add-Content merged.txt "`n$($_.FullName)`n"; (Get-Content $_.FullName | Where-Object { $_.Trim() -ne "" } | ForEach-Object { ($_ -replace '^\s*{\s*$', ' {') -replace '^\s*}\s*$', '} ' }) | Out-File -Append merged.txt -Encoding utf8 }

This way, you can quickly get an AI-generated overview without manually tracing the whole code.