Generating Code Tours Using Locally-Runnable LLMs

Onboarding new developers is a considerable overhead, requiring senior developers to provide mentorship and documentation. Code tours—structured guides to key code sections—can streamline this process, yet their manual creation still requires time and effort. This research investigates how to automate the generation of debugging-focused code tours using locally runnable Large Language Models (LLMs), which provide more confidentiality, stability, and reproducibility than cloud-based models. We plan to address three key challenges: (1) selecting relevant code segments, (2) generating clear and context-aware explanations, and (3) automatically evaluating the quality of generated tours. Ultimately, our goal is to reduce the onboarding burden on senior developers by automatically generating persistent, verifiable documentation artifacts to help junior developers navigate and understand a codebase.