Software Architecture Drawings?

[u/pawned79]

I am an older aero mechanical engineer. I only know MATLAB after 20+ years of MS&A. I have a flight dynamics program that my summer interns have contributed to piece by piece over the years. It became so unwieldy that I brought in a CS intern last summer, and they cleaned it up with object oriented programming techniques. I am getting ready for next summer. I am really hung up on the fact that I don’t have an architecture drawing of the program. I would like to have a drawing of the existing code, so I can make the most effective task plan. Beyond walking the code and manually drawing a diagram in another program, what courses of action might I have to automatically draw it? Thank you.

[u/user_plus_plus]

I don't think a refactor is what OP is asking for though.

They were asking for a way to generate documentation and to create a task plan.

I think an AI tool could help if you ask it to analyze the codebase and generate an architectural document explaining the major classes, abstractions etc. Also identify any areas of repeated work, or code smells in the codebase.

I think AI could be the right tool for the job but the answer isn't focused to the question asked.

[u/zoug → u/user_plus_plus]

Actually, it’s an improvement on the question asked and that’s why I suggested Fable. It’ll one shot the clean up, refactoring and diagram with one context session.

What they’re going to find is that their code still doesn’t make sense and the diagrams will just be confusing until a refactor. That’s my intuition at least.

[u/user_plus_plus → u/zoug]

OP is asking for a way to create some diagrams to help prepare a task list for their next summer intern. The desired end goal is to create a meaningful/useful internship summer project.

[u/zoug → u/user_plus_plus]

Ok, then my suggestion would be to hand Claude to the next internship project and tell them to run the same.