AI-Powered Documentation Generator for Legacy Codebases

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As a former CIO who managed teams working with millions of lines of legacy code (Visual Basic, Sybase, Oracle Forms, and worse), I feel the pain of maintaining and onboarding developers to legacy systems. Believing that LLM-enabled tools can play a role in solving this, I've built a tool that automatically generates documentation for legacy codebases using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) & Claude Sonnet. At first glance, I think this approach has merit. Some samples are in the README. I welcome your thoughts. The Problem: - Legacy codebases are notoriously difficult to understand and navigate - Onboarding new developers takes months - Making changes safely requires deep knowledge of the system - Business stakeholders lack visibility into system architecture The Solution - an MCP-based tool that: - Scans your codebase - Generates README files at each level of the directory structure - Creates C4 architecture diagrams showing system components and relationships - Builds a complete documentation hierarchy from high-level architecture to implementation details The tool aims to helps teams: - Onboard developers faster with clear system documentation - Make changes confidently with better understanding of components - Communicate system architecture to stakeholders - Maintain living documentation that evolves with the codebase Have a look / try it out! GitHub: https://github.com/jonverrier/McpDoc License: MIT To credit various other similar works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43154065 ( jtwaleson's post) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42521769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41393458

Visit product View on Hacker NewsMar 19, 2025

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