BLOG / GUIDES
Guides
Practical guides for codebase documentation, onboarding, and code quality
CLAUDE.md & AGENTS.md: The Complete Guide
What CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md are, what to put in them, best practices, and how to keep them fresh automatically. Learn to give coding agents real repo context.
Code Health: The Complete Guide (2026)
Code health is a defect-validated measure of how risky code is to change, scored from 25 deterministic biomarkers across three pillars. Reproduce it on your repo.
Codebase Documentation That Stays Current
Living codebase documentation rebuilds on every commit, scores its own freshness, and feeds AI agents. Learn how it works and start with repowise free.
Git Intelligence: Hotspots, Ownership & Coupling Explained
Git intelligence reads your git history to surface hotspots, code ownership, bus factor, and change coupling. Learn how the signals work and where to start.
How to Prioritize Technical Debt (Impact-per-Effort)
Prioritize technical debt by impact-per-effort: rank refactoring targets, find dead code, and read coverage as risk. Build your ranked worklist today.
Spotting Declining Code Health Trends Before They Bite
Declining code health is usually a slow-burn problem. Teams feel it as “everything takes longer” long before they see a hard failure. The trick is not…
Hidden Coupling: Finding the Files That Always Change Together
Hidden coupling is the code you do not see in imports. Two files have no direct dependency on paper, yet they still move together every few weeks because…
Nested Complexity vs Cyclomatic Complexity (and Why It Matters)
Nested complexity is the metric people reach for when cyclomatic complexity stops telling the truth. Cyclomatic complexity counts decision paths. Nested…
Refactoring Priorities: Picking What to Fix First
Most teams do not have a refactoring problem. They have a refactoring priorities problem. There is always more code that could be cleaned up than time to…
Untested Hotspots: The Highest-Leverage Coverage Targets
Untested hotspots are the files most likely to break your product and the least likely to catch it in CI. The signal is simple: high churn, low or zero…
What Is Code Health? A Practical Guide to the 25 Biomarkers
What is code health? It is the part of a codebase that tells you whether the system will stay easy to change next week, next month, and next quarter. Code…
Use git history to catch stale ADRs before they mislead agents
Use git history to flag stale decisions in an architecture decision records workflow. Catch drift early with a 500-commit view before agents follow old code.
Generate a CLAUDE.md from your repo’s ADRs and wiki
Generate claude.md from ADRs and wiki into a day-one agent brief: 1 file, clear rules, and links to the decisions that matter most.
Generate claude.md from a real repo, not a blank page
Generate claude.md from repo architecture, ownership, and recent changes with MCP calls. Give Claude Code a day-one brief that cuts guessing.
How to Auto-Generate Documentation for Your Codebase with AI
Every engineering team starts with a noble intention: 'We will document everything.' It begins with a clean README, a few architecture diagrams in Excalidraw...
Code Ownership and Bus Factor: Mining Git History for Team Risk
Every engineering leader has a 'nightmare scenario': a critical system fails at 3:00 AM, and the only person who understands the underlying logic is unreacha...
Developer Onboarding Is Broken — Here's How to Fix It with Codebase Intelligence
The first week at a new engineering job is often a blur of HR orientation, hardware setup, and the inevitable 'Valley of Despair' that comes with cloning a m...
How to Find Dead Code in Your Repository (and Why You Should)
Every codebase is a graveyard of good intentions. In the rush to ship features, we often focus on what to add, rarely on what to remove. Over time, your repo...
Git Hotspot Analysis: Find the Riskiest Files in Your Codebase
Every codebase has a 'haunted graveyard'—a module so fragile and convoluted that developers avoid touching it at all costs. These files are often the source ...
How to Generate a CLAUDE.md File for Your Repository
For years, the `README.md` has served as the primary entry point for human developers. It describes the 'what' and the 'how' of a project, providing just eno...
Keeping Documentation Fresh: Why Stale Docs Are Worse Than No Docs
In the world of software engineering, there is a pervasive myth that some documentation is always better than no documentation. We treat the README, the inte...
repowise init: One Command to Index Your Entire Codebase
Every software engineer has experienced the 'Day Zero' friction of a new project: cloning a massive repository, staring at a directory structure with 2,000 f...