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Practical guides to codebase documentation, onboarding engineers, code quality and keeping docs fresh, with commands and workflows you can run today.
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  1. Guides

    Codebase Documentation That Stays Current

    Good codebase documentation is generated from the code, refreshed on every commit and checked against the tree. Here is how to set it up with repowise.

    Read8 min read

  2. Guides

    Git Intelligence: Hotspots, Ownership and Change Coupling

    Git intelligence mines commit history for hotspots, code ownership, bus factor and change coupling. The commands, the signals, and how to act on each.

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  3. Guides

    How to Prioritize Technical Debt (Impact-per-Effort)

    Prioritize technical debt by ranking files on churn, bug history, reach and effort, then work a short list. Commands to build the worklist from your repo.

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  4. Guides

    Spotting Declining Code Health Trends Before They Bite

    Catch declining code health before an incident: track score slope per snapshot, alert on three falls in a row, and rank by hotspots, tests and dependents.

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  5. Guides

    Hidden Coupling: Finding the Files That Always Change Together

    Find hidden coupling by mining git history for files that change together without importing each other: a 20-line script, the key thresholds, and repowise.

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  6. Guides

    Nested Complexity vs Cyclomatic Complexity: What Each Measures

    Cyclomatic complexity counts paths for testing. Nested and cognitive complexity count reading cost. See both scored on the same code, with thresholds.

    Read7 min read

  7. Guides

    Refactoring Priorities: Picking What to Fix First

    Rank refactoring work by impact per effort: score change frequency, blast radius and bug history against effort, then let repowise health build the queue.

    Read9 min read

  8. Guides

    Which Code to Test First: Combine Coverage, Complexity and Churn

    Find untested hotspots: files with high churn, many dependents and low coverage. Rank them with git, lcov and repowise, then write the tests that matter first.

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  9. Guides

    Code Health Metrics: The 23 Markers Behind a File Score

    Code health measures how costly the next change to a file will be. See the 23 markers that score it, how to read a 1 to 10 score, and how to act on it.

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  10. Guides

    How to Generate Documentation from Your Codebase with AI

    Generate documentation from your codebase with AI: parse the code, mine git history, write the pages, and refresh only what changed on every merge.

    Read9 min read

  11. Guides

    What Is Bus Factor? How to Measure It from Git History

    Find who owns each file and which files have a bus factor of one, using git shortlog, git-fame and repowise, plus what to do about the risky ones.

    Read8 min read

  12. Guides

    Developer Onboarding Documentation That Stays Current

    Cut new-developer ramp-up with an onboarding wiki, an architecture map, ownership and decision history generated from the code, with a day-by-day plan.

    Read8 min read

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