LACY: Simulating Expert Mentoring for Software Onboarding with Code Tours

TL;DR

LACY is a hybrid system combining AI and expert input to create reusable code tours, significantly improving onboarding effectiveness and reducing expert workload in complex software environments.

Contribution

First hybrid approach integrating AI-generated content with expert curation for software onboarding through code tours.

Findings

Learners achieved 83% quiz scores with expert-guided tours.

Participants preferred tours over traditional self-study.

Experts found tour creation less burdensome than live walkthroughs.

Abstract

Every software organization faces the onboarding challenge: helping newcomers navigate complex codebases, compensate for insufficient documentation, and comprehend code they did not author. Expert walkthroughs are among the most effective forms of support, yet they are expensive, repetitive, and do not scale. We present Lacy, a hybrid human-AI onboarding system that captures expert mentoring in reusable code tours-to our knowledge, the first hybrid approach combining AI-generated content with expert curation in code tours. Our design is grounded in requirements derived from 20+ meetings, surveys, and interviews across a year-long industry partnership with Beko. Supporting features include Voice-to-Tour capture, comprehension quizzes, podcasts, and a dashboard. We deployed Lacy on Beko's production environment and conducted a controlled study on a legacy finance system (30K+ LOC). Learners using expert-guided tours achieved 83% quiz scores versus 57% for AI-only tours, preferred tours over traditional self-study, and reported they would need fewer expert consultations. Experts found tour creation less burdensome than live walkthroughs. Beko has since adopted Lacy for organizational onboarding, and we release our code and study instruments as a replication package.