analyzing the PDG repo using Gemini

This post documents the first time I used an LLM to assess the Physics Derivation Graph

All of the files in the git repo (tl;dr: Gemini crashed)

I uploaded all of the Physics Derivation Graph software and asked Gemini 2.0

The git repo has 96 files; 14 .py and 58 .html

$ find . -type f | wc -l
      96

10503 lines of Python, 4337 lines of HTML, and 968kB

Uploading the files uses 230,346 tokens of an available window size of 1,048,576 tokens on 2025-01-09.

Here's the prompt I provided along with the files:

The following files are from a project that works but is incomplete. 
Review the code and provide suggestions of what the most important 
tasks are to work on next.

Result: Gemini crashed ("An internal error has occurred.") after 40 seconds of processing. Two more tries also didn't work.

Just the .py and .html files

Removed everything except for 13 py and 58 html files, down to 816kB.

Now the token count is 209,717

The following files are from a project that works but is incomplete. 
Review the code and provide suggestions of what the most important 
tasks are to work on next.

That prompt resulted in Gemini making 7 very reasonable suggestions. I opened two new issues on github as a result of Gemini's assessment.

In the same context I asked

Briefly describe the purpose and goals of the software project. 
Highlight its key features and benefits.

The result from Gemini offered relevant text that I have included in the README.md file. The text is literally better than what I could have written!

Next I asked for a visualization,

Create a visual diagram of the program's flow, showing the sequence 
of operations, decision points, and loops. Create a markdown file 
with ASCII art for use in a README.md file.

That produced some almost-correctly-formatted ASCII art. The caveats provided by Gemini were very reasonable

"This is a simplified representation. The actual program flow involves many more specific states and transitions, not shown for simplicity."

Lastly I asked Gemini

Document the public APIs and web interfaces exposed by the software, 
including input/output formats and usage examples. Provide the answer 
as a single HTML file.

Gemini's output was mostly HTML (some Markdown) and very useful.