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I routinely prompt Claude to clone a GitHub repo and explain how part of it works.

As concrete evidence, the author describes prompting Claude several times a day to clone a repo from GitHub and explain how a given component works. ✦ AI generated

Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-03 · original ↗

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Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".

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▦ GitHub ✳ Claude

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In practice · 2

LLMs have changed the equation in a way that makes the original open-source dream of examining and modifying code much more feasible.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 70%

Context · 1

In practice, the freedom of open source mostly means leaning on other people to do the examining and modifying, because most people can't justify the time commitment to read and modify code themselves.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 65%