Auto-Doc | Devpost

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Inspiration

Auto-Doc was inspired by our own experience as developers. We know that most people don’t enjoy writing documentation, and it often isn’t prioritized during development, even though good documentation is critically important. That’s why we built a tool that makes documentation easy and reliable by generating it directly in your terminal.

What it does

Auto-Doc is a VS Code extension that automatically generates structured documentation for a project with a single keybind. The extension performs a Depth-First Search (DFS) over the active working directory, generating README.md files at each level of the directory tree. Leaf directories generate documentation directly from their source files, while parent directories aggregate documentation from their child directories and files to create cohesive, hierarchical READMEs. Developers can choose where documentation generation begins by running the extension from any file in the directory they want to document. Auto-Doc treats that directory as the root of traversal, making it easy to document only a specific module or subproject without extra configuration. Auto-Doc also includes a machine learning architecture visualization feature. With a separate keybind, the extension detects whether a file belongs to a machine learning project and, if so, generates a graph representing the model architecture directly from the code.

How we built it

We made a vs code extension using npm with typescript and their proprietary development module. The scripts that interact with the active repository were made in python using gemini's api for our agentic purposes. We coordinated our project into multiple parts. We had someone working on the machine learning diagram, the depth first search algorithm, the gemini summarizing agents, and the frontend of the extension.

Challenges we ran into

It was our first time working on a VS code extension and we found documentation for this matter not well detailed or with many examples of non-deprecated code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First user available application, published on a major platform. We also accomplished our minimum viable product within the first 16 hours.

What we learned

We learned how to create an extension for VS code.

What's next for Auto-Doc

We’ll continue maintaining Auto-Doc, refining it to better support larger codebases, and building out advanced features that we couldn’t fit into the initial 36-hour development window.