Guide

An unfamiliar codebase

You have been handed a repository you have never seen and a question about it. The instinct is to start opening files. Six calls, none of them a guess.

1 · See the shape

Before anything else, find out what kind of thing this is — how it is laid out, and where the weight sits.

Folders and their file counts, for very little. Swap to tree: headlines on the one directory that looks relevant and every file arrives with a line saying what it is for.

2 · Learn the local words

Your vocabulary comes from somewhere else, and it will not match. Convert it before you search with it.

What comes back are the names this codebase actually uses — and often a concept the repository has already written down about the area you are walking into.

3 · Find the landscape

Now search with the real words, and ask the question you actually have. Results are ranked by how well they answer it, not by how often they mention it.

4 · Read only what you need

You have names now, so address them directly. One method body, not the file it lives in.

5 · Ask why it is like that

Code says what; history says why. This works down to a single method — the commits that built the text currently on screen.

6 · Check what the repository already knows

Somebody may have paid for this lesson already.

Six calls, a few thousand tokens, and you understand a subsystem you had never seen — having opened exactly one method body on purpose.

This page names what exists. The depth behind every name — the bounds, the failure modes, how they compose — ships inside the binary at help:///, and answers to explore and read exactly like your code does. Install it, and your agent has the manual.