01
Mechanized Comprehension
Understand software systems through tooling that extracts structure, history, meaning, and intent from source code at scale.
A codebase research lab · Est. 2024 · Research since 2019
Most of the code you'll touch this year, you didn't write.
Methodologies and tools for that. Since 2019.
01 Four pillars of research.
The work is organized around four themes that emerged from years of building tools and applying them in real-world engagements.
02
Mechanized Verification
Verify correctness and prevent regressions through deterministic, change-time analysis.
03
Mechanized Remediation
Identify and resolve architectural drift, decay, and technical debt through tool-assisted intervention over expensive rewrites.
04
Directed Evolution
Evolve software deliberately toward new behavior through continuous, traceable, and guided transformation.
02 Open source.
Open source tools born from real engagements. Each one built to solve a problem that manual approaches couldn't.
Terrain
Renders a git repository as a zoomable sunburst of its directory structure, sized by lines of code. The whole codebase on one screen, at every zoom level.
Comprehension
Clarity
A software design tool for AI-native developers and coding agents. Review design impact before commit.
Verification
Eureka
Visualizes the structure of large Kotlin and Java classes as interactive graphs. A 3,000-line class on one screen, updating in real-time.
Comprehension
Cardbox
Structural analysis of Android codebases through graph queries via jQAssistant.
Comprehension
Timelapse
Leverages Git history to reveal tribal knowledge. Every codebase has a story in its version control. Timelapse makes it legible.
Comprehension
03 Origin.
February 20, 2017: I picked up Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code while struggling with a codebase I couldn't make sense of. By 2019, I was building tools to solve it. What once took nine months to earn, a team's trust, collapsed to two or three days.
Read the full story04 Publications.
Papers, tools, and open source releases from the lab.
2026ComprehensionTerrain: zoomable sunburst visualization of git repository structure2025VerificationClarity: software design for AI-native developers and coding agents2023ComprehensionEureka: breakthrough tooling for Kotlin and Java codebases2021ComprehensionCardbox: structural analysis of Android codebases via jQAssistant2019ComprehensionTimelapse: leveraging Git history for codebase comprehension
-Additional research being curated from the archives.
Feathers wrote the book that named the problem.
We're building the tools that solve it.