Generating a JSDoc comment for your function using OpenAI.

#jsdoc #javascript #ai #opensource

This article is inspired by Remotion’s internal package, ai-improvements. This internal package is used to improve/generate JSDoc comment and log in the console for a function in the Remotion’s source code.

This use case is quite different because you would normally use the source code and let OpenAI generate API documentation but instead in Remotion, this internal package uses the OpenAI API to generate JSDoc comment for a function using API documentation and the source code.

We will look at a high level how this package is configured:

improve-docs.ts
generate-jsdoc

Improve docs

import path from "path";
import { OpenAI } from "openai";
import { getApis } from "./map-over-api";
import { findMistakes } from "./tasks/find-mistakes";
import { generateJSDocTask } from "./tasks/generate-jsdoc";

improve-docs.ts has the above imports. generateJSDocTask is imported from ‘tasks’ folder.

depending on the task, you could either generate a JSDoc or find mistakes.

Generate JSDoc

generate-jsdoc.ts uses the openai API and has prompts as shown in the above image.

Please note that this will only write the generated JSDoc to the console. Would it be possible to write these JSDoc comments programatically in the file? Not sure, but it is worth reading the AST documentation to see if there’s any API available to add JSDoc comments just above the function or class name. ts-morph is known to be used in shadcn-ui/ui to manipulate the source code at AST level.