I built Understand Anything to help with a problem I run into often: understanding an unfamiliar codebase without spending hours jumping between files, docs, and dependency paths.
The tool analyzes a repo and builds an interactive map of files, functions, classes, dependencies, and architectural relationships. You can explore the map, search across the project, ask questions, generate onboarding notes, and inspect what may be affected by a change.
It started as a Claude Code plugin, but I’ve been making it work across different AI coding environments such as Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and others.
The main design goal is to avoid producing a giant graph that looks impressive but does not actually help people understand the code. I am trying to make the graph useful as a learning and navigation layer.
I’d appreciate feedback from people who work on large repos, onboard new engineers, or use coding agents.
This looks very relevant for onboarding. Have you tried this with new engineers on a real project? I’d be curious whether it actually changes how quickly people build a mental model of the system.
I use it in my company, a startup that vibe coding for thousands line of code every day. And it works fine. Engineers love the business knowledge mode.
Hi HN,
I built Understand Anything to help with a problem I run into often: understanding an unfamiliar codebase without spending hours jumping between files, docs, and dependency paths.
The tool analyzes a repo and builds an interactive map of files, functions, classes, dependencies, and architectural relationships. You can explore the map, search across the project, ask questions, generate onboarding notes, and inspect what may be affected by a change.
It started as a Claude Code plugin, but I’ve been making it work across different AI coding environments such as Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and others.
The main design goal is to avoid producing a giant graph that looks impressive but does not actually help people understand the code. I am trying to make the graph useful as a learning and navigation layer.
I’d appreciate feedback from people who work on large repos, onboard new engineers, or use coding agents.
This looks very relevant for onboarding. Have you tried this with new engineers on a real project? I’d be curious whether it actually changes how quickly people build a mental model of the system.
I use it in my company, a startup that vibe coding for thousands line of code every day. And it works fine. Engineers love the business knowledge mode.
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