Online code intelligence

[marcelosousa]

What is your idea? Please describe.
Software developers spend a lot of time reading code online. The most basic scenarios are when you start on a new project or when you are doing a code review. My idea is to provide code navigation on every code snippet that you can access online (it could be on Github, Gitlab, Stackoverflow, etc). In the next step, we should be able to search for particular code snippets based on natural language queries.

Is your idea related to a problem or a need? Please describe.
I'm always frustrated when I'm jumping into a new project and I have to download it and all its dependencies to get IDE-like features. For some languages, this doesn't even work out of the box because either I'm going to some generated code (like in Typescript) or it's not reasonable to assume that the project simply compiles. Also, coding sometimes just feels like puzzle making where snippets are here and there and need to be tweaked. This process of finding these code snippets can take a long time - we should be able to share code in an easier way.

Describe the solution you'd like
A platform where I can search for code easily and jump to the definition of every symbol in a code snippet that I read online. At least, there should be a set of potential repositories where this code is defined. Ideally, if build information is available the system should be smart enough to figure out which version of the dependencies, the project is using and establish the correct links.