The conversation was about viewing the source online vs the README so clearly I meant I want to glance through the source online. There's a few reasons I might be doing this:

- before deciding if I want to clone the repository.

- Or sometimes I might just want to check the hooks of a particular API (eg the outputs of a Terraform module) where there isn't really a need to manually clone the repository just to validate some assumptions.

- Sometimes I might want to quickly verify the code that's on origin master is up-to-date (everyone has committed PRs and merged back into master).

- Sometimes I might just want to validate what code kicked off the CI/CD pipeline.

- Sometimes I might be demoing some changes in the sprint review and rather than spin up another IDE / switch branches / etc I might just open a new tab and walk the team through what has been committed on Github

Also nobody was talking about Gitlab specifically. BitBucket and GitHub were mentioned though.

How would you know you even want to look at the code at all if you haven't read the description of the code which is currently below all the code at the bottom of the page?

I need to know what the project is and what it's trying to do before I have any interest in looking at the code.