Simon Willison’s Weblog

8th May 2023 - Link Blog

GitHub code search is generally available. I’ve been a beta user of GitHub’s new code search for a year and a half now and I wouldn’t want to be without it. It’s spectacularly useful: it provides fast, regular-expression-capable search across every public line of code hosted by GitHub—plus code in private repos you have access to.

I mainly use it to compensate for libraries with poor documentation—I can usually find an example of exactly what I want to do somewhere on GitHub.

It’s also great for researching how people are using libraries that I’ve released myself—to figure out how much pain deprecating a method would cause, for example.