Hi there! Ian here, one of the co-founders. Nick (the other co-founder) and I are lifelong developers and we’ve been through every frustration imaginable when it comes to understanding a codebase and making sense of what we’re reading so that we can solve a problem or when getting up to speed when we start a new job. We also know that Dev Tools haven’t really been getting as much love as they should so we set out to make something that as engineers we know solves those pain points and provide better tooling with techniques from parts of industry that don’t necessarily filter back to general developers but are incredibly useful. I’m of course speaking of techniques from compiler development and some from cybersecurity in things like reverse engineering and static analysis.
Everyone knows about go to def and basic symbol information, that’s kind of a commodity in the tools we use now, but there’s so much more that simply hasn’t been explored yet and we’re aiming to bring those techniques mainstream to help engineers in general.
Whize makes code intelligence and knowledge base search tools that help engineers to write code better and faster by providing actionable static analysis results, visual debugging, code generation (in progress), and one-click code references.
We currently support searching over 27k open source code projects on github as well as utilizing our code intelligence and doc features directly on that code without ever cloning a repo or setting up a project from the comfort of VSCode, or our WebApp if you prefer. All of our functionality works on your local projects so you can use them as you’re working on new code or anything indexed with us directly, private or public.
We’re looking to support other development environments in the coming months, but we went with VSCode first because developer surveys suggest it’s the most popular one right now.
Sounds really useful, but I couldn't grasp exactly what your product does by reading your website. Let me give you some constructive feedback.
The 'How it works' section describes how to connect the code to your platform. It finalizes at the step 'Start Searching' and mentions 'use our intelligence features to gain insight into your code'. But why? What is the advantage? What can I do with it that my IDE doesn't have already? Perhaps you describe it on the video, but I think many of your visitors won't play it.
I would suggest that you extend the step 3 showing the key benefits of your platform over the standard IDE features.
I think this is excellent advice, and I appreciate you taking the time to say it. I'm making some changes to how we frame things site wide (including what you have suggested) to hopefully fix that problem.
Everyone knows about go to def and basic symbol information, that’s kind of a commodity in the tools we use now, but there’s so much more that simply hasn’t been explored yet and we’re aiming to bring those techniques mainstream to help engineers in general.
Whize makes code intelligence and knowledge base search tools that help engineers to write code better and faster by providing actionable static analysis results, visual debugging, code generation (in progress), and one-click code references.
We currently support searching over 27k open source code projects on github as well as utilizing our code intelligence and doc features directly on that code without ever cloning a repo or setting up a project from the comfort of VSCode, or our WebApp if you prefer. All of our functionality works on your local projects so you can use them as you’re working on new code or anything indexed with us directly, private or public.
We’re looking to support other development environments in the coming months, but we went with VSCode first because developer surveys suggest it’s the most popular one right now.